More than four years ago I said good-bye to my then 19-year old son, Patrick Sean Kelly, as he was beginning his freshman year at the University of Southern California in the Filmic Writing Program. He was excited about beginning his new life and viewed the future with an indomitable spirit of optimism. Fifteen months ago, on May 26, 1996, I went to Tijuana, Mexico to identify the badly battered body of that same vibrant and promising then 22-year old young man, his smile no longer there and his promising future destroyed.

I cannot imagine any more horrific experience than staring through dirty glass in a small, hostile, dark building, in a foreign country where you don't speak the language and where people are waiting impatiently for you to leave so they can go back to their dinner, and seeing the barely recognizable face of the child you raised and loved and watched grow and develop into a young adult. It's an experience you read about, watch movies about, but never expect to have to go through -- not being able to touch him, to hold him, to comfort him, to talk to him, to ask what happened, to tell him he's not alone any longer, to tell him you love him, to say good-bye.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of a nightmare that continues to this day.

My son was a Canadian born Aboriginal, a member of the Blood Band in southern Alberta. He always felt very strongly that Aboriginal people should have their own voice and tell their own stories. At the time of his disappearance, he had just completed his Junior year in the screen-writing degree program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The program only admits 24 students a year. He was the first Aboriginal person ever admitted to the program and he felt a sense of responsibility because of that. He wanted to write screen plays that not only gave Aboriginal people a sense of history and identity, but screen plays that showed the rest of society the humanity of Aboriginal people. And by all accounts, he was well on his way to doing just that before his life was so brutally and inexcusably taken from him. He was to have been inducted into the National Greek Honor Society in the summer of 1996, but the notice came too late

My son disappeared from the USC campus on the morning of May 4. He was reported missing to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) by campus security and myself on May 7. The LAPD were little to no help. They didn't interview his friends; they didn't check his room at the University. In fact, the only thing they did was put his car on the NCIC list. I discovered on May 7th through my son's bank that there were ATM transactions in Mexico on the weekend he disappeared. The bank wouldn't tell me where in Mexico, however, without a court order. I asked the LAPD to get the information and they refused. They said I should work on it myself. As it turns out, that information was pivotal and had we been able to identify the city the transactions were from on May 7th, my son would be alive today.

My son was a Canadian citizen (I am a U.S. Citizen), a permanent resident of California. I therefore also reported my son missing to the Canadian Embassies in Mexico and to Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. During the weeks of searching, I never heard back from either one of them.

After receiving no help from any official government or law enforcement agency, on May 12th I hired Investigative Resources out of Long Beach, California. On May 15th I traveled from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to Los Angeles to look for Patrick myself. When I was in Los Angeles, I was finally able to convince the bank to provide information on exactly what cities the ATM transactions were from. On May 17th, I learned that one transaction was in San Clemente and the others were in Tijuana, Mexico. On May 18th we located a videotape of my son at a 7-11 in San Clemente.

On May 20th, Doug Roth of Investigative Resources located my son's car at a parking lot on the U.S. side of the border in San Ysidro. My son's car had supposedly been parked there on May 4th. However, from there the mystery only deepened. The parking lot has 24-hour surveillance cameras. The video tape from a four hour period — the time period my son's car was parked — is missing and cannot be located. Additionally, the car logs show that someone paid the accumulated fees and removed my son's car from the parking lot on May 15th — several days after my son was dead — and returned the car to the lot 24 hours later. However, the car lot video tapes don't show his car moving during those two days. No one has been able to explain this discrepancy. There was fresh damage to his car, and whoever last drove the car was several inches shorter than my son. His car was locked and had a security bar across the steering wheel. Whoever took his car had to know the location of the car and had to have the keys.

On May 25th, Roth found my son's body in a Tijuana morgue under the false name Luis Rodriguez. All of his possessions — his ATM card, his Canadian passport, his car keys, his clothing — were missing. I have never been able to get a satisfactory explanation as to why he was called Luis Rodriguez. I was given half-a-dozen different stories about how he died. He was either hit by a car, was a passenger on a motorcycle which struck a pedestrian and was then thrown into the path of an on-coming car, he was a passenger on a motorcycle which hit a pothole and was thrown off the motorcycle, he was a pedestrian hit by a motorcycle. All of the documents I was provided by the Municipal Police, the Fire and Rescue squads, the hospital and the morgue conflicted with each other on such basic issues as his physical description, his age, his name, how he came to be there, etc. I was given three different causes of death -- head trauma, multiple trauma, septic shock.

After transporting my son's body back to Los Angeles, I attempted to get the L.A. Coroner to conduct an autopsy on my son. They refused. They said it was no longer their case since he was no longer missing. They said it was not their jurisdiction. I finally paid for a private autopsy which concluded that my son did not die as the result of a motor vehicle accident as claimed by the Mexican authorities.

I contacted Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs after the results of the autopsy. They said there was nothing they could do. They said the case was Mexican jurisdiction. They also advised me that if I continued to push for answers, Mexican authorities would slur my son's name.

I wasn't concerned about such threats but I was concerned about why such threats were being made, why there was such a massive cover-up and why no one in the U.S., Canada or Mexico was prepared to meet their responsibilities to determine what happened to my son.

The Canadian Government was finally forced by public pressure into asking the Government of Mexico for an investigation. Twenty-two months after my son's death, the Canadian Government sent in a team of RCMP investigators. Unfortunately, it was far too little, too late. The only significant conclusion was that I will never know what happened to my son because too much time has passed and too much critical evidence is missing.

After much pressure, the LAPD finally agreed to do limited forensics work on my son's car and discovered what they said is "probably" blood spatters on the driver's side door. However, they refuse to test that blood to see if it is my son's. They claim they have no jurisdiction since my son's body was discovered in Tijuana. There is no evidence that my son's car ever left the State of California, yet they refuse to investigate the theft of his car from a California parking lot after my son was already dead.

The LAPD advised me that only the bank could request an investigation into the banking activity. At least three of the transactions — those that wiped out my son's bank account — occurred 15 hours after he was already lying comatose in a Tijuana hospital. The bank advised me that only a law enforcement agency can request such an investigation. Again, nobody is prepared to investigate what happened to my son's bank account. In fact, it took 18 months and a court order granting me authority as my son's sole heir before the bank would even agree to provide written records of those transactions.

ATM videos of some of the transactions exist at a bank branch in Tijuana. I have attempted to get copies of those videos to see who made the transactions. The bank provided videos from 1994 instead of 1996. Nobody — Canadian officials, Mexican officials or U.S. officials — have been prepared to help me view those videotapes. The bank now claims those ATM video tapes have since been destroyed.

The L.A. Coroner's office finally agreed to conduct a private autopsy if I would pay for it. Those autopsy results were not provided until the end of December 1996. That autopsy said my son's injuries could have been caused by a motor vehicle accident but without accompanying accident scene reports, they couldn't be definitive. However, the autopsy also found that results found in the Mexican autopsy were inaccurate. My son did not have a ruptured spleen, his ribs were not broken, his skull was not fractured, there was no evidence he died of septic shock. I still don't know what my son eventually died from. In a follow-up meeting with the Coroner's office, they admitted that they could not determine if all my son's injuries were caused at the same time by the same blunt force trauma. They said that at least one of the serious wounds -- the one to the back of my son's head -- was not the kind of injury usually associated with a secondary impact of striking one's head against the pavement. They described the wound as "linear" which is normally caused by something with a curvature. In all likelihood, my son was attacked, beaten, robbed, and in an attempt to escape his attackers was ultimately struck by a motor vehicle of some kind.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission agreed to look into the case. They concluded that there was no investigation into my son's death, there was no "accident" scene investigation, there was no conclusive evidence that "Luis Rodriguez" was the same person as my son and that evidence was not preserved. They recommended a complete investigation be undertaken and that the police officers involved be administratively — and perhaps "penally" — disciplined. Since that report was issued, the author of the report has been appointed as Mexico's new Attorney General. To my knowledge, nothing has happened with the report's recommendations.

When my son eventually died in the Cruz Roja hospital, the hospital phoned the State Judicial Police and reported that my son had died "as the result of the commission of one or more crimes, including possibly homicide". Still, no investigation was undertaken.

Mexican officials claimed they didn't know who my son was, that he had no identification when he was transported to hospital. However, I obtained a copy of the hospital "patient in-out log". On that log my son is admitted on the 5th of May under his real name of Patrick Sean Kelly. His name is struck out and "Desconicido" written in. I have never received an explanation for this document.

While nothing can ever make up for the loss of my son -- for the graduation he will not attend, for the movies he would have made that I'll never see, for the grandchildren I'll never have, for the promise that will never be fulfilled -- I hope his death will at least have some effect on preventing others from going through the horrible, frightening and painful experience he undoubtedly went though. Mexico -- and particularly Baja State -- is a dangerous and volatile place to go for anyone, particularly adventurous unassuming students. There are still no satisfactory answers as to how or why my son died. There is still no investigation into what happened to him or who cleaned out his bank account using his ATM card after he was already comatose or who took his car after he was already dead. The only thing I know for sure is that I no longer have my son and that corrupt Mexican authorities are at the very least involved in the cover-up of what happened to him. And U.S. and Canadian authorities are assisting in that cover-up by refusing to assist me in any way regarding the circumstances surrounding the disappearance and death of my son.

At one point I was advised by an LAPD officer that I wouldn't receive any official assistance because of NAFTA. I suspect that is in fact at least part of the problem. Our governments are not prepared to upset a U.S./Canadian trading partner over the life of a 22-year old with no political or economic importance. I suspect that another reason that our governments have shown so little interest in pursuing the truth in this matter is because my son was an Aboriginal Canadian. He spent a great deal of his young life fighting for Aboriginal rights and respect, rights and respect that are all too elusive in North America and particularly in Canada. Mexico's lack of concern for human rights in their country is well-documented and well-known. It is disheartening, however, to learn that the lives of our children are as meaningless to our own governments. Our children deserve better than that. The loss of a child is unbearable; to lose a child in this way is preventable; the lack of assistance by those charged with such responsibility is unforgivable.

The CBC Program The Fifth Estate produced a documentary on my son's disappearance and death, and the lack of help from the Canadian Government. The program aired in November of 1997 and was re-broadcast in April of 1998 after more young Canadians ran into trouble in Mexico. The full transcript and Canada's reaction to the broadcast is on the attached page:
Unexplained Death Part 2

Click here for my latest correspondence with the Canadian Government
Correspondence

Of course, this is not an isolated event in Mexico. It happens on a daily basis.

One such article recently reported:

Mexican crime 'spiralling'
By Jeremy McDermott in Bogota

CRIME in Mexico has reached "truly critical" proportions, President Ernesto Zedillo said yesterday.

As he made the admission, the head of a regional anti-kidnap squad and 14 officers working under him were charged with being members of a kidnapping gang after the squad chief and two others were arrested while allegedly trying to dispose of a tortured body.

In a speech to a national prosecutors' conference, Mr. Zedillo said Mexico's crime problem was "very serious". Violent crime was rising three times faster than the growth in population.

"Public security continues to deteriorate . . . In none of the states is there an acceptable level of public safety and in some states and Mexico City we are experiencing critical levels [of crime]", he said. The police and judicial institutions were riddled with officials who aided or committed crimes, he said.

Mexican gangs have now overtaken the Colombians as the most powerful drug cartels in the Americas. Drug profits are conservatively estimated at £9 billion, five per cent of the nation's gross domestic product. The cartels are able to offer enough money to tempt most officials to look the other way, if not to participate actively in the trade.

Drug money underpins share and property prices, and is the lifeblood of local economies, since it is siphoned into public works by corrupt officials.

The Mexican authorities are well aware of the scale of the problem, and the first step in fighting crime will be to tackle official corruption, says the Interior Ministry.

Other links on-line express the problems of lack of human rights in even more vivid terms.

AI2 (Amnesty International Reports)

Mexico: Widespread Torture and Ill-treatment ...

Human Rights Watch Reports on Mexico

Mexico - Consular Information Sheet

It will never end until our governments start taking a stand that our children's lives count. And Mexico will never change until people stop travelling to Mexico and stop spending money there.

For those who read Spanish, here is the link to the Mexican National Human Rights Commission report on the lack of Baja State authorities investigation into my son's death and their recommendations.
Recomendación 111/96 de la CNDH

More information is coming out all the time about the dangers of travel in Mexico. This is part of an article that appeared in the April 22, 1998, edition of USA TODAY.

Mexico travel alert may be toughened Five Americans murdered there since December
By Maria Puente

American artist Carol Schlosberg and her boyfriend never encountered a single problem on their 5,000-mile motorcycle ride from Vermont to Mexico. Then they arrived in sleepy Puerto Escondido, where Schlosberg was raped, mutilated and murdered on the Pacific coast beach.

Peter Zarate, an American real estate executive, hailed a taxi in his affluent Mexico City neighborhood, then was shot to death and dumped on a street nearby.

Alan Swan and Herb Dohr, two Nevada fishermen, went to sleep on a beach in San Quintin in Baja California, where they were beaten and left to die.

William Markely Nixon, a U.S. architect and socialite, was fatally stabbed in the hacienda he turned into a multimillion-dollar hotel in Cuernavaca.

The slayings of the five Americans since December raise questions about the safety of travel in Mexico, the top international destination for U.S. residents.

Besides the killings, countless other foreigners have been robbed and beaten in Mexico City, where crime has increased sharply in the past two years, according to the U.S. State Department and private security firms. Sunday, a journalist with Texas Monthly was shot and critically wounded when robbers hijacked the taxi he and three friends had hailed in Mexico City.

``(Crime) is one of the greatest problems we're facing now,'' says Jose Antonio Zabalgoitia, public affairs minister at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The State Department, however, is considering toughening a Mexico travel advisory issued following Zarate's death in December.

Of the 10 countries most visited by U.S. residents, only Mexico has a State Department advisory aimed at travelers.

``In several cases, tourists report that uniformed police are the perpetrators of crime,'' the department says.

For the State Department's current information sheets for travelers to Mexico and other counties, Internet address: http://travel.state.gov

Mailing address: Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Overseas Citizens Services, Room 4811, Department of State, Washington, D.C. 20520

On April 27, 1998, ABC News 20/20 Monday had a special report on the same problem of travel in Mexico. See the following link for more details:

20/20 Transcript

Someone out there knows something. Someone was with my son in Tijuana. Hopefully, someday that person will find a conscience and tell somebody what he knows. Whoever last drove my son's car was approximately 5'8" in height, speaks at least some Spanish, listens to Spanish American radio stations, probably drinks canned Nestea Iced tea. My son's car was a 1994 Honda Civil EX, electric purple in color, with California License Plate No. 3Gun636.

If you have any information, please contact me right away. And in any case, please don't travel to Mexico and tell everyone you know not to travel there either.

This is a picture of my son at his High School graduation. Happy, looking forward to a very bright future, absolutely no idea of the horrors that would replace our dreams.

This is a picture of my son the way I last saw him. While this picture may bother some of you, I hope it will have the effect of making sure you never travel to Mexico again. When you look at this picture, remember your families who would have to find you this way. Remember the pain and the fear my son went through. He would not want anyone else to suffer like he undoubtedly did.

The one thing we know for certain is that someone was with my son, someone used his bank card to clean out his account, someone used his car keys and used his car after he was already dead. If you have any information at all, please contact me as soon as possible.

For more information on my son, please see the following links:

Patrick Sean Kelly Memorial

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UPDATE!!!!!

More young Americans have recently lost their lives in Mexico. One young woman was given a tainted drink in a bar and died 20 minutes later on the street. A young man, who was last seen in the back of a Tijuana police car on August 2, 1998 was found the next day, badly beaten, no possessions, supposedly the victim of another traffic accident. The police again claimed to have no knowledge of the victim. The killing fields of Tijuana continue unchallenged.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Many people ask me what they can do to help. First, don't travel to Mexico. Don't let your children travel to Mexico. Try to force our governments to warn people about the dangers of travelling in Mexico. Try to make our governments care about our children. My son is only one of many. For those of you who want to write letters, here are some links to various Governmental e-mails.

GOVERNMENT OF CANADA

Lloyd Axworthy is the Minister of Foreign Affairs. His junior Minister is David Kilgour.

Foreign Affairs Portfolio

Jean Chretian is the Prime Minister of Canada.

Prime Minister Portfolio

Jane Stewart is the Minister of Indians Affairs.

Indian Affairs and Northern Development Portf...

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

Depending on where you are from, here is the link to the U.S. Congress.

Congressional Email Directory

GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO

The Mexican Human Rights Commission site is:

National Commission for Human Rights

The senior official in the Government of Mexico would probably be the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The Government of Mexico site is:

MEXICO'S INDEX ©

Thank you for reading, for listening, and for helping my son seek justice. They may have silenced his voice, but his spirit soars.

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