Parade of Coffins in Sonora Marks Two Years Since Fatal Shooting By US Border Agent Curt Prendergast - Nogales International
go to original October 15, 2014

More than 140 protesters marched through Nogales, Sonora  (Curt Prendergast)

A crowd carrying black coffins made its way through the streets of Nogales, Sonora on Friday to mark two years since a US Border Patrol agent fired through the border fence and killed Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez.

An autopsy report indicated Elena Rodriguez, 16, was hit with as many as 10 bullets (see video below), all but one striking him in the back, during a drug-smuggling and rock-throwing incident on Calle Internacional on Oct. 10, 2012. More than 140 people gathered Friday to demand the agent be held accountable for the shooting and to call on Mexican authorities to take action.

The coffins bore the names of people who had been killed by Border Patrol agents in recent years, including Ramses Barron Torres, 17, killed in Nogales in January 2011, and Sergio Adrian Hernandez, 15, killed by an agent shooting from El Paso in June 2010.

Hernandez’s mother attended Friday’s vigil, as did Araceli Rodriguez and Taide Elena, mother and grandmother of Elena Rodriguez, and Jesus Castro Romo, who was shot by a Border Patrol agent in Walker Canyon in November 2010 and spoke to the crowd from a wheelchair.

Amid the songs played from the back of a pickup truck at the site of the shooting and poems read aloud from atop the rock face at the base of the border fence, Gabriela Elena Lopez, aunt of Elena Rodriguez, drew a parallel between the shooting of her nephew and the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. on Aug. 9.

While the Brown shooting received massive media coverage, the shooting of her nephew has seen far less publicity, Elena Lopez said.

Read the rest at Nogales International

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