By Mónica Romero, El País
November 8, 2025
In the Mexican state of Sonora, in 2019, three mothers and six children were gunned down. The trail leads to two semi-automatic rifles, which were sold in U.S. gun shops. No authority on either side of the border has thoroughly investigated the origin of the weapons, nor how they ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels
It was March 9, 2019, when Rhonita María LeBarón-Miller, a 30-year-old American woman belonging to a Mormon community in Mexico, was preparing for the birth of her twins. She was four days away from her scheduled delivery date at the Madero Hospital, in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua.
She and her husband, Howard Miller, lived in the Mexican town of La Mora. Based in the municipality of Bavispe, in the Mexican state of Sonora, they were part of a Mormon community located between Sonora and Chihuahua. They had five young children together, as well as two more — Howard and Krystal — from previous relationships.
That same March 9, a man went to a gun store across the border in the United States and bought an Anderson 5.56 caliber semi-automatic rifle. Eight months later, this weapon would be used in the massacre of Howard and Krystal, Rhonita, and her twins, who were less than a year old. Two other mothers and two more children would also be killed.
