A robbery aboard a Guadalajara city bus took a turn that few of those involved could have seen coming.
At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, August 20, two men with one pistol between them boarded a 275-F bus in Zapopan at the corner of the Periferico and Carretera a Tesistan and ordered the occupants to deliver up their valuables.
If what followed is any indication, robbing buses in Guadalajara is tantamount to playing at Russian Roulette.
Shortly after the two thieves made their demands, a passenger forcibly wrestled the firearm from one of them, after which they both fled on foot. The newly-armed — and clearly dangerous — citizen decided to give chase and after catching up with them shot the two men in the head with the 9-millimeter pistol beneath a bridge. One died on the spot, while the other expired en route to the hospital.
While authorities, including Guadalajara Police Commissioner Salvador Caro Cabrera, have called it a homicide, the word others are using for the incident – including people residing in the area around the scene of the crime – is linchamiento, lynching.
Increasingly, lynchings seem to be a not-unpopular form of meting out justice in Guadalajara.
Last Sunday, an employee at a pharmacy being held up with a knife turned the tables on his attacker, stabbing him to death with the robber’s own weapon.
And on Monday, a mob of people chased a man caught in an act of forcible larceny and beat him to death just a block away from Parque Rojo in the Centro Historico.
Yesterday’s violent reprisal by a would-be victim was not, then, without precedent.
After shooting the two men, the unidentified vigilante fled the scene and was last seen boarding another bus. Witnesses to the shooting were unable – or perhaps, unwilling – to supply investigators on the scene with a description of his appearance which could lead to his apprehension.