Mexican gunman fires across border toward U.S. highway workers
FORT QUITMAN, Texas — At least one Mexican gunman fired a high-powered rifle across the border at four U.S. road workers Thursday in an isolated ghost town east of Fort Hancock, Hudspeth County sheriff’s officials said.
The bullets did not injure the four men.
Mike Doyle, chief deputy of the Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Office, said a rancher spotted a white pickup fleeing the area on the Mexican side at 10:30 a.m. — the time the shots were fired.
The bullets stuck private land along the unpaved Indian Hot Springs Road, which is about half a mile from the border fence. Hudspeth County borrowed the land to store gravel and rocks used for road construction. The workers were filling a hole left last year by rainstorm damage.
The ghost town of Fort Quitman is 25 miles east of Fort Hancock and 80 miles southeast of El Paso. Fewer than a dozen ranchers raise cattle in the remote area.
[…]
Texas Rangers scour an area 25 miles east of Fort Hancock. (Vanessa Monsisvais / El Paso Times)
Hudspeth county Sheriff’s deputy arrives trailing dust to the remote site of a border shooting Thursday afternoon to secure the location and process the site for evidence. Four Hudspeth County workers were shot at from the Mexico side of the border as they gathered grave to fill a hole in an adjacent road 25 miles east of Fort Hancock (Vanessa Monsisvais / El Paso Times)
UPDATE: A commenter on the Frontera List google group is highly skeptical:
My chief concern here is whether the story supports the headline. IGo to the link to read the whole thing.
don’t think it does. If the headline stated something like: “Sheriff:
Mexican gunmen fire into U.S.” it at least would be attributed to what
is the only source in the story.
Nothing in this story verifies that the shooting was AT the workers on
the U.S. side. All the story states is that they heard shots. The
Border Patrol’s reaction — no investigation — also is telling.
Sheriff West needs an opportunity to explain with more specificity how
he arrived at the allegation that drug smugglers are shooting into the
U.S.
This is the kind of headline that very clearly promotes the
“spillover” mythology, but the story is very very thin.[…]