Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Funeral Homes, Cemeteries, Hospitals, and the Presence of Death: The Juarez Tuesday Beat

The Juarez Beat: Eleven Dead on Tuesday

As the corpse of a murder victim in Juarez was being embalmed at a funeral home at about 1 p.m. yesterday afternoon, a group of men entered and asked to see the body. The owner of the establishment denied the request since the body was still being prepared, but at that moment a group of armed men entered the building, causing the first group to flee through a back door. A few minutes later the owner, Ramón Quintana González, 50, his son Ivan, and a friend of the family, Octavio Aragón, were dead from gunshot wounds and another one of González's sons was wounded. The corpse that was being embalmed at the time of the incident was going to be transferred to another funeral home, but there had been difficulty getting another funeral home to accept it, for fear of just the kind of incident that took three lives at this funeral home, the Funeraria Satélite.

"When is this going to end?" asked one of the neighbors, who had come across the bodies of two decapitated men (pig faces painted on their chests) fourteen hours earlier behind the Jardines Eternos cemetery, about 500 yards away from the funeral home.

At 8:30 last night two men arrived a the emergency entrance of the Social Security Hospital (No. 66), one of them injured with a bullet wound. After the wounded man was admitted a group of armed men burst into the emergency room, located the men, and killed them.

The body of a 28-year old woman,
Blanca Iris Pérez Chico, was left next to an empty lot at Parque Industrial Aerojuárez, at about 3:45 p.m. Witnesses said the vehicle carrying the body then ran over it before leaving the scene. She had been kidnapped earlier in the day.

Compiled from staff reports in Diario, click here for story.

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