ELIZABETH MANDALA - 18 yo (2010) - Sugar Land/Houston TX

Monterrey MX ---- The body of a Texas high school student
reported missing by her mother has been found in Mexico.
Mexican authorities say they're investigating the deaths of
18-year-old Elizabeth Mandala and two Mexican men as homicides.

The bodies of the three were found dead Saturday in a crashed pickup
truck near Mina, a town in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon. A
spokeswoman for the Nuevo Leon state Attorney General's Office says
autopsies revealed that all three died from severe blows to the head and
body. She says investigators believe the accident was staged.
The motive for the killing is unknown, and the relationship between
Mandala and the two Mexican men is unclear.
Mandala was a senior at Kempner High School in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.

A Kempner High School student died while traveling in Mexico over
the weekend, according to Fort Bend Independent School District
officials.

School officials informed parents of students at the
school of the death of Elisabeth Mandala via the district’s School
Messenger e-mail system.

According to Chief Communications
Officer Mary Ann Simpson, additional information regarding the
circumstances of the student’s death has not been received by the
district.

According to HCN news affiliate KTRK Channel 13, a
Mexican newspaper reported that Mandala was found dead this past
Saturday in Mina, Mexico.


According to the paper, authorities believe Mandala and two
Mexican men found dead in a Dodge truck may have been beaten to death
hours before.

The vehicle where the bodies were found was
wrecked, however authorities investigating the incident suspect a
possible cover-up for murder, per news reports.

Mandala, 18, was a
senior at Kempner High School, according to the district official.

“As
part of our continuing effort to keep you informed, we are saddened to
report that one of our seniors, Elizabeth Mandala, died while traveling
in Mexico over the weekend. As her death occurred in Mexico, the funeral
arrangements have not been finalized. We will post the funeral
information on our campus website when we are notified by the family,”
read an excerpt of the e-mail to parents.

Counselors from the
district’s crisis team have been working with students and staff in the
aftermath of the student’s death.

“This news has saddened our
staff and our student body, and our hearts and prayers go out to the
family,” Kempner Principal Troy Mooney said to parents at the school via
the district’s messaging system.

A Houston
police report says a Houston-area high school senior found beaten to
death in Mexico had been a stripper and wanted to smuggle immigrants.
The Houston Chronicle reports on its website that a police
missing persons report quotes Elizabeth Mandala's mother as describing
her 18-year-old daughter's activities.
The student at Kempner High School in Sugar Land, Texas, and two
Mexican men were found dead Saturday in a crashed pickup truck near
Mina, a town in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon.
Autopsies revealed that all three died from severe blows to the
head and body, and officials believe the crash had been staged.

The Sugar Land high school senior found beaten to death in Mexico last weekend wanted to be a
coyote who smuggled illegal immigrants across the border and also
worked as a stripper, according to her mother's statement to police, a
Houston Police Department missing persons report reveals.

Elisabeth Mandala, 18, who attended Kempner High School in the Fort Bend Independent School
District, was found dead Saturday along with the bodies of two men on
the highway to Monclova, just west of Mina, a town of 6,000 near
Monterrey.

The pickup had been staged to look as if it had been involved in an accident, but
investigators found evidence the truck's accelerator may have been
jammed with a rock, according to the Monterrey newspapers, Milenio and El Norte

“It's pretty apparent she was doing stuff down there she shouldn't have been,” said a
law enforcement source close to the investigation who asked not to be
identified by name.

Mandala's family has declined to comment on the case or the mother's statement to
police, calling the investigation into the teen's slaying “a very
sensitive situation.” A phone call to their home went unanswered
Wednesday.

Mandala's mother did not contact Houston police to report her daughter was missing until
after the teen had already been found dead Saturday in Mexico.

Paula Benitez Mandala, 47, told Houston police her daughter was driving a rental car
when the teen left Houston last week because the girl had wrecked her
own car. The mother, however, could not provide Houston police a
description of the rental car.

Plans were vague

The girl, a U.S. citizen born in Texas, left her mother's home in the 10100 block of
Synott Road on April 27 to go meet “somebody” and maybe go to Mexico,
according to her mother's statement in the HPD report. The next day,
Elisabeth Mandala posted on her Facebook page that she was in Mexico and
would be back in Houston the following day. But she did not return.

By noon on Saturday,
Paula Mandala had grown worried enough to call Houston police to report
her daughter missing. But her daughter's beaten body had already been
found six hours earlier on a Mexican highway in a Dodge Dakota pickup
with Texas license plates. It was unclear if that was the same vehicle
that Elisabeth Mandala had rented before leaving Houston.

Found beaten to death with her were Dante Ruiz Siller, 38, and Luis Angel Estrella
Mondragon, both from Mexico City, but described as having local ties.
Fingerprints confirmed Mondragon, a taxi driver, had a criminal record,
but Mexican police were unable to say what his criminal history
included, El Norte reported.
One Mexican media outlet reported the two men were brothers.

Mandala's relationship with the two men or how she knew them is unclear.

Falsified papers

Mexican authorities also recovered false identification papersin Mondragon's possession, El Norte reported.

Houston police could not elaborate on Mandala's desire to be an immigrant smuggler because
her mother did not provide them with any additional details, they said.

The U.S. Consulate has filed paperwork on the Mandala family's behalf to claim
the teen's body, according to a report in El Norte on Wednesday.

Over the Line

As Mexican drug cartels increasingly recruit American teens as runners, a Sugar Land teen goes across the border and ends up dead.

By Paul Knight

Wednesday, Jul 21 2010

In the early morning hours of May 1, Mexican authorities found two trucks smashed into each other along a federal highway, about 30 miles northwest of Monterrey in northern Mexico.


Photos courtesy Adriana Mandala

Eighteen-year-old Elisabeth Mandala was a few weeks away from graduation at Sugar Land's Kempner High School before her murder in Mexico.

Inside one of the vehicles, a black Dodge pickup with Texas license plates, police found three dead bodies — two men and a teenage girl.

Photos from the scene show the girl's bloody and bruised body, clad in a hot pink shirt and black skirt. She's lying across the truck's bench seat, and her face isn't visible; it's partly covered by her bleached blond hair. (The driver of the other truck wasn't hurt.)

In someplace other than Mexico, investigators might have wanted time to decide if the car collision or something else had killed the people inside. But here it was quickly determined that the girl and two men had been beaten to death.

Someone had placed rocks on the truck's accelerator to send the pickup speeding down the road. It crashed into a delivery truck from a business in the nearby town of Mina.

Mexican authorities from the Nuevo León Ministerio Público identified the men as Mexican, both middle-aged. The girl, however, seemed entirely out of place. She carried a passport that identified her as 18-year-old Elisabeth Mandala from Sugar Land.

"The experts mentioned there are no gunshot holes in the bodies of the victims, but their bodies are full of blood, indicating they were attacked with blows," reported El Porvenir, a Monterrey newspaper. "The bodies of the victims were on each other...so it is suspected that they were already dead before the big impact."

A few years ago, a triple murder involving an American teenager in Mexico might have been bigger news. Border towns, after all, have long been favorite destinations, considered fairly safe, for American youth looking for reckless fun.

But violence in Mexico is now part of daily life, and Americans are discouraged from straying too far from resort cities that line the country's southern coasts. And it's not just the frequency of crime along the border that's frightening. In one murder from January of this year, for example, a man's face was cut off and sewn to a soccer ball.

And when the victims appear somehow linked to crime — the two men with Elisabeth carried multiple forms of false identification and one had a lengthy criminal record — few people regard them as victims at all.

"When that's the case, it becomes very difficult to find out much of anything," says Jim Moritz, one of the few private investigators in Texas who will work in Mexico.

"If you go there to, say, pick up drugs, you're doing that at your own peril."

In fact, last year the Texas Department of Public Safety warned parents that Mexican drug cartels are actively recruiting Texas youth.

"These violent organizations are luring teens with the prospect of cars, money and notoriety, promising them if they get caught, they will receive a minimal sentence," a DPS report states. "The Mexican cartels...are now using state-based gangs and our youth to support their operations on both sides of the border."

The warning came on the heels of the shocking arrest of two Texas teens who worked as assassins for the Gulf Cartel and started killing at ages 13 and 16. According to an article in Details magazine, the teens often bragged about money and girls, along with killing other boys their age.

"Along the border, this is all there is," one of the boys told the Details reporter. "You're either a cop, a federal agent, or a drug trafficker. For kids like me, there's only one path."

The benefit to cartels is that American citizens can move easily across the border. Especially young people, who have long crossed into Mexico for weekend trips, making them familiar faces to police.

Mandala's murder, initially, made a few small headlines at news agencies in Monterrey, and newspaper and television reports followed in Houston. Elisabeth's sister, 23-year-old Adriana Mandala, told the Houston Chronicle a few days after the crime that it was simply "a very sensitive situation."

But when news broke that Mandala, the high school student from suburban Houston, had worked as an "exotic dancer" and bragged about becoming a coyote, the story went national.

CBS News identified Mandala as "the teen stripper," and others called her a "student-turned-stripper." AOL News headlined its story, "Death in the Fast Lane..."

When NBC's Today Show reported the story, it brought on a former profiler from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to theorize how this could happen to a young woman. "It sounds like shewas living life on the wild side a little bit. And again, at 18," the FBI profiler told reporter Ann Curry, "you think you're bulletproof."

At one point, when television news vans and reporters got so thick along the road in front of the small horse ranch where Elisabeth grew up, her mother closed and locked the gate to her property. She stopped talking.

But the basic narrative of Elisabeth's fate was already born: The attractive, privileged high school student living a double life wanted
to smuggle people across the border, and she was murdered because of it.


http://www.houstonpress.com/2010-07-22/news/over-the-line/

Sugar Land High School Teen~Elisabeth Mandala, Killed in Mexico

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trAGvHVdo5I&feature=related

From over a year ago.