The Associated Press
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico- Gunmen with high-powered weapons ambushed a patrol car along one of this sprawling border city’s main avenues and unleashed a hail of bullets Thursday, killing a police commander and wounding his partner.
Juan Sergio Montes, a 17-year-vetran of the municipal police force assigned to patrol Nuevo Laredo’s city center, sustained at least 20 gun shot wounds, seven to the face, and died instantly on Luis Donaldo Colosio, a crowded thoroughfare that links highways to bridges leading to Laredo, Texas, across the Rio Grande.
The 36-year-old was on routine patrol at the time of the shooting, which occurred shortly before 3 p.m. Crime scene investigator Mario Francisco Erazo said Montes apparently saw the vehicle carrying the gunmen waiting for him and tried to steer into a nearby vacant lot, but was unable to escape.
Wounded in the attack was Montes’ 30-year-old partner, Elivira Perez, who was hit by a bullet in the back. The police cruiser slammed into a tree after Montes was killed, Erazo said.
He said an unknown number of shooters used machine guns and rifles to target the cruiser. No arrests were made in the case, but authorities found a sport utility vehicle abandoned with its motor still running a short distance from the site of the shooting, and hypothesized it had been used by the assailants.
Montes had also served as a driver for former Nuevo Laredo mayor Horacio Garza six years ago.
Montes was the fifth police officer shot to death so far this year in Nuevo Laredo, an area gripped by increasingly bloody violence believed to be caused by warring drug factions fighting for control of key smuggling corridors into the United States.