Two bodies were found over the weekend in San Ignacio and Orange Walk Towns, and speculation is rampant that whomever they may turn out to be, they will help solve a number of unsolved missing persons reports.
The first was discovered at 11:25 a.m. in a cane field on a feeder road a mile and a half southwest of Trinidad in the Orange Walk District, police say.
The body, already badly decomposed, was clothed in navy blue ¾ Dickies trousers, a khaki sports shirt and white Air Jordan tennis shoes. The left hand was bounded with string and police found an apparent gunshot wound to the back of the skull. A live 9mm round and an expended shell of the same caliber was also recovered on-scene.
Initially, Orange Walk police told us today that they thought that they had finally found the remains of Alden Hall, 18, a student reported kidnapped on February 9 of this year. Hall was the center of an underground war in Orange Walk, which was responsible for two murders on Valentine’s Day, five days later. The man thought responsible for those murders, Alfredo Urbina, was captured two months later and is remanded for allegedly kidnapping Hall.
Unfortunately, the remains were not those of Hall, and the post-mortem conducted on Sunday, July 27, could not give a definite cause of death for whoever the person was. Latest reports are that the National Crimes Investigation Branch will travel to Orange Walk tomorrow, Tuesday, to run possible matches of the corpse to recent disappeared persons.
Other young men gone missing in the last few months include Earl Crawford, Armick Escobar, and Yeshua Roches.
The second body – or what was left of it – was recovered an hour later in the bushes of the Santa Rosa Road, off the Calla Creek Road in San Ignacio – site of two ambushes earlier this month.
The bones were scattered around, twenty feet from the roadside, as well as the clothes the person was last wearing: a long blue jeans pants, a dark sleeveless undershirt, a white and blue Nike tennis, and a grey boxers shorts. The skull had what appeared to be a bullet hole at the back.
This body was today identified as that of Pedro Guzman, 25, against whom murder charges were dropped on July 1 for the 2004 murder of Hershel Brown.
According to his mother, Lorraine, Pedro claimed to have been followed on multiple occasions and was reported missing two weeks ago.
A post-mortem was conducted this afternoon at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital.