
"Ma, I’ll be okay." That was what 33-year-old Latavia "Tay" Washington McGee told her mother on Wednesday 1 March before setting off on the roughly 1,500 mile journey to Mexico to visit a medical clinic.
Two days later, Washington McGee and the three friends accompanying her were ambushed and kidnapped in the border town of Matamoros by gunmen believed to be part of a Mexican criminal cartel.