Photos of a peewee football player flashed across a slideshow. The image of a smiling young man adorned memorial T-shirts. But the body of the American gunned down three weeks ago by the Gulf cartel in Mexico was kept shielded from funeral-goers.
Over 100 people gathered Saturday to remember Shaeed Woodard at the first funeral service for the two people killed in the attack in the border town of Matamoros. The sendoff came at the end of a month that should have featured birthday celebrations for the man slain just days before he turned 34 during a tightknit group's road trip to help Woodard's cousin get cosmetic surgery.
