A lesbian couple from Texas was tortured and shot dead before their bodies were dismembered and left in two garbage bags on streets in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez.
The women were identified as Nohemí Medina Martínez and Yulizsa Ramírez, both 28, of El Paso, according to the Chihuahua State Office of the Attorney General.
The bags containing their bodies were found about 17 miles apart from each other on a stretch of Juárez-El Porvenir Road Sunday morning.
One of the bodies was in the San Agustín neighborhood and the other was found at the entrance of the Jesus Carranza village.
Yulizsa Ramírez (left) and Nohemí Medina Martínez (right), both of El Paso, Texas, were found tortured and shot dead in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Sunday morning. They were both dismembered, and the remains of their bodies were found in bags left on the side of a highway.
Family members last saw Yulizsa Ramírez (left) and Nohemí Medina Martínez (right) on Saturday before they disappeared
Mexican newspaper El Diario reported that they were visiting family members in Ciudad Juárez and they last saw the two Saturday.
It’s unclear for how long they were in Mexico. Both were Mexican citizens and lived in Texas.
Karen Arvizo, director of Chihuahua Committee for Sexual Diversity confirmed that Karen and Chihuahua were the mothers to three children to DailyMail.com. The couple were married on 2021.
Arvizo fears that the murders of Medina Martínez and Ramírez could go unsolved like many other hate crime incidents across Mexico’s LGBT community in the past.
Arvizo explained that they are concerned about the fact authorities might do absolutely nothing. “We feel second-class citizens, and we don’t really matter.”
On Monday, Ciudad Juárez authorities found the bodies of two other women at an intersection in the Patria-Zaragoza neighborhood. Both of them had also been shot and tortured. They were not identified.
One victim died on the spot. Another victim died of a gunshot injury at the local hospital.
However, it is unknown whether the murders were connected.
Nohemí Medina Martínez (left) and Yulizsa Ramírez (right) were parents to three children
Recent crime stats reviewed by El Diario shows that at least 65 homicides have been reported so far this year in Ciudad Juárez, the most violent of Chihuahua’s 67 municipalities. One-hundred victims of these crimes were identified as being women.
Data released by the Chihuahua State Office of the Attorney General showed that 1,424 of the 2,476 homicides that were registered in the state in 2021 took place in Ciudad Juárez, about an average of four per day.
Comparatively, there were 2,715 deaths in 2020. 1,507 of these occurred in the border community.
Ciudad Juárez district attorney Jesús Carrasco attributes the majority of the homicides to smaller drug gangs like ‘Los Mexicles,’ ‘Doble A,’ ‘Los Aztecas’ and ‘La Nueva Empresa.’
‘We don’t see the big cartels as active or active in the city, but we do see the gangs,’ Carrasco said, as quoted by online news outlet La Verdad Juárez. “We see the small groups, or cells that have separated from the big cartels. This has created new groups. There could also be some conditions that can be creating these deliberate deaths.