FLORENCE, S.C. (NewsNation) — The wife of a victim rescued from a violent kidnapping in a Mexican border city told NewsNation he doesn’t want her to visit him in the hospital over possible fear of the cartels.
The kidnapping of four Americans over the border shook families across the Carolinas as they agonized for days while waiting to learn whether their loved ones survived a cosmetic surgery road trip that turned deadly.
The four victims, Latavia Burgess, Shaeed Woodard, Eric Williams and Zindell Brown, were all South Carolina natives.
The two dead — Woodard, 33, and Brown, in his mid-20s — will be turned over to U.S. authorities following forensic work at the Matamoros morgue, the governor said.
Michelle Williams, the wife of victim Eric Williams, talked with NewsNation just a day after he was rescued. She said he told her not to appear on camera, so she spoke by phone and the conversation raised more questions than anything else.
Williams said she first realized there was an issue when the FBI came to her house on Sunday morning.
“They wanted to confirm who he was,” she said. “And that was he with them. And I did not know at the time that he was with them particular friends. I didn’t even have any idea that they were even there.”
Williams, again, told NewsNation she didn’t know that her husband had gone to Mexico.
Williams said she has been speaking to her husband periodically but he did not share much about what went down this past Friday in Mexico.
“He didn’t want to get into detail,” she said. “They went there for her to have cosmetic surgery.”
But despite having successful surgery on both of his legs, he asked his wife not to appear on camera and not to come visit him at the hospital.
Williams did not have any idea when she was going to see her husband, saying, “And he doesn’t want us to come there.”
When asked he if was worried about the cartels, Williams said he worried that something would stretch back to South Carolina where they lived.
“Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know,” she said. “I just know he doesn’t want us there. I don’t know. He made it out of surgery and he’s doing okay.”
The surviving Americans, Burgess and Williams, are both natives of Lake City. They were returned to U.S. soil on Tuesday in Brownsville, the southernmost tip of Texas and just across the border from Matamoros.
“It was difficult; I have children myself, my family I think about that as well but our family, our community is very knitted, so when one hurts, we all hurt. So it was very traumatizing to see this happen to citizens of Lake City, South Carolina,” said Lake City Mayor Yamekia Robinson.
Zalandria Brown, Zindell Brown’s older sister, said her brother, who lives in Myrtle Beach, and two other friends accompanied Burgess to Matamoros where she was believed to have a scheduled tummy tuck surgery.
The four were as close as “brothers and sister” after growing up together in a small town in South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, she said. They planned to split driving duties on their way to the medical procedure. Still, she said her brother had expressed misgivings about possible danger.
Tamaulipas, Mexico Gov. Américo Villarreal Villarreal said the four were found in a wooden shack, where they were being guarded by a man who was arrested. Villarreal said the captive Americans had been moved around by their captors, and at one point were taken to a medical clinic “to create confusion and avoid efforts to rescue them.”
Sheriff TJ Joye of Florence County, South Carolina, said federal investigators are leading the investigation and added that he has never encountered such a case in his 38 years in law enforcement.
Lake City residents said it is not uncommon for people to travel as far as Florida or Mexico for similar procedures.
Local, state and federal lawmakers expressed support for the victims’ families Tuesday.
Republican U.S. Rep. Russell Fry, who represents South Carolina’s 7th District, tweeted that his office had been in contact with one of the families after hearing the “heartbreaking” news.
State Rep. Roger Kirby led a moment of silence on the South Carolina House floor. Kirby said information on the “unbelievable” and “senseless” killings seemed fairly limited and called for his hometown of Lake City to rally around the families.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the people responsible would be punished. He referenced arrests in the 2019 killings of nine U.S.-Mexican dual citizens in Sonora near the U.S. border.
The FBI had offered a $50,000 reward for the victims’ return and the arrest of the abductors.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.