TikTok star and singer Esmeralda Ferrer Garibay, 32, her husband Roberto Carlos Gil Licea, 36, her son, Gael Santiago, 13, and her daughter Regina died in a truck. Their bodies were found in plastic wrappings and dumped in their pickup truck after being reportedly executed in a cartel-style, the New York Post reported.
Prosecutor Alfonso Gutierrez Santillan said in a press statement that they were killed in the deserted grey Ford Ranger in Guadalajara on August 22 and added that, although the forensic evidence had not been obtained, ballistic and blood evidence indicated almost certainly they were killed in that location.
Surveillance footage allowed the investigators to trace the route of the truck to a nearby auto repair shop, where they discovered bloodstains, shell casings, and ballistic evidence which indicated the family likely had been killed there before being driven away, according to the Latin Times.
In an alarming turn of events, armed persons kidnapped them a few minutes after they had left the prosecutor in the office.
As Mexican media reports, the two men had been meeting two people they knew outside when they were ambushed. Three were captured and one escaped, and is still at large. Prosecutor Blanca Trujillo told reporters that the attackers had been waiting a bit more than two hours before they initiated the assault, meaning it was a planned attack.
The identity of the family was confirmed officially on August 28, with Mexican newspaper El Financiero reporting the husband was likely the main target of the killings.
Ferrer Garibay had developed a seemingly lavish lifestyle on social media, where she frequently uploaded videos boasting designer goods, such as Dior, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton, luxury cars, cosmetic surgeries, and luxurious holidays to her base of more than 44,000 TikTok fans. In some of her posts, she lip-synched to narco-corridos, a scandalous genre of Mexican ballads praising drug cartel life, but also suggesting that her husband was affiliated with those cartels.
A video that had the caption of the benefits of being a girlfriend of a narco and featured a photo of her with a Gucci handbag gained almost 140,000 views. There is uncertainty at this point as to whether the murder of the family was in response to the social media appearance of Ferrer Garibay.
Instead, speculation has focused on the commercial affairs of the husband, namely the selling of vehicles and the cultivation of tomatoes in the state of Michoacan, as a potential motive behind the murder, and that the husband might have been a victim of organised crime. The family was just settling in Guadalajara, seeking improved employment opportunities after abandoning Michoacan, which the US Department termed as one of the worst places in Mexico.
