MEXICO CITY, Mexico, Dec. 27, 2019 (Gephardt Daily) — Mexican authorities have arrested a police chief in connection with the fatal shootings last month of three women and six children with ties to Utah.
According to media reports citing local governmental officials, Fidel Alejandro Villegas, police chief of the Janos municipality, in the state of Chihuahua, has been arrested.
The state of Chihuahua borders Sonora, where the women and children were shot to death on Nov. 4 of this year.
A federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the arrest of Villegas to Reuters, the agency stated.
The family members were part of a decades-old settlement founded by followers of a fundamentalist religious group called The Church of the Firstborn, an unauthorized offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The group has a compound called La Mora close to where the women and children were killed.
In November, family member Lafe Langford, Jr., posted on Facebook video of a burned-out, bullet-riddled Chevy Suburban in a field next to a road near the Sonora-Chihuahua border.
“This is for the record, Nita, and four of my grandchildren are burnt and shot up. Right on the road out of La Mora,” he wrote.
Nita was later identified in Langford’s post as Rhonita Miller.
Langford also reported two other Suburbans, carrying two mothers and 10 children, had vanished. He later posted the news that both mothers and a number of children had been killed or wounded.
The youngest among the dead were twins, less than a year old.
See their photos, shared by family members, in the photos below.
