Baffled police say Mexican child murderers are only children themselves, in a shocking case that has the nation’s law enforcement and mental health experts gravely concerned.
Mexico has faced years of violent kidnappings and killings of adults by adults, but this is perhaps the first documented incident which involved that same kind of criminal conduct in young children.
Detectives investigating the abduction and slaying of 6-year-old Cristopher Raymundo Marquez Mora last Thursday have detained two 13-year-old girls, two 15-year-old youths, and one 11-year-old boy as suspects.
On May 14, 2015, the gang of five apparently lured their young victim from his home and then tied, choked, and stabbed him to death.
The young boy’s butchered corpse was found two days later buried in a shallow grave which the killer kids had elaborately disguised with leaves and a dead animal’s carcass.
The acts they perpetrated closely mimic scores of kidnappings and killings routinely committed in their district -- a wave of violence which many child advocates are arguing has negatively influenced Mexico’s younger generation and hardened their hearts and minds to brutality.
The five Mexican child murderers are themselves "victims of an environment of extreme violence," asserts Juan Martin Perez, executive director of an NGO called the Children's Rights Network.
"There's a strong presence and culture of organized crime and a lack of culture of rule of law," he said, adding that the often scary games Mexican children are now playing "reflect what they experience every day."
That’s very little solace, however, to the mother of the slain boy, who refuses to accept there’s any valid excuse for supposed child-play to end in an actual homicide.
"It's illogical for it to be a game," she angrily told reporters this week. "They should pay for my son's life."
Indeed, if the boy’s under-aged killers aren’t ultimately prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, then his unusual and alarming murder threatens to touch off even more violence…
"We want vengeance,” one of his relatives warned. “If they don't give us justice, we will take revenge."
