EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Police are investigating two home invasion shootings that claimed the lives of six men and a woman in Juarez, Mexico.
The first attack took place Thursday night in the Patria neighborhood near Juarez’s lower valley and involved a vehicle that crashed into the fence of a house near the corner of Robinson and San Lorenzito streets.
An unknown number of assailants entered the home and shot four people, including a pregnant woman, police said. Three males died on the scene; the woman survived, and an ambulance took her to a hospital. Video taken at the scene shows police and firefighters examining a wrecked vehicle near the home.
Police told Border Report news partner ProVideo that the residents kept an “altar” to Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, inside the house. U.S. authorities say members of Mexican drug cartels have been known to seek favor from that unique spiritual icon.
Early Friday in Anapra, a northwest Juarez neighborhood across the border from Sunland Park, New Mexico, police responded to a second mass shooting.
A police report states neighbors reported hearing multiple gunshots near the corner of Camaron and Quimera streets.
Police officers reported finding three men and a woman dead inside and multiple 9mm and .223-caliber bullet casings on the scene. A second woman survived the shooting, police said.
Juarez has now recorded 60 homicides in the first 19 days of September.
In a brief news conference on Friday, Juarez Municipal Public Safety Director Cesar Omar Muñoz said additional police officers assigned to the two neighborhoods.
He said Chihuahua state authorities are investigating the shootings but did not rule out a possible drug motive.
Juarez authorities in July reported several home invasion killings and linked them to drug gang activity in the aftermath of the transfer of 120 gang members jailed in Juarez to prisons elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua.
ProVideo in Juarez, Mexico, contributed to this report.
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