A group of 15 heavily-armed masked gunmen kicked down the door of a Texas border home and opened fire without warning, in a home invasion that injured a 9-year-old boy and his 33-year-old mother.
The assault took place in the morning hours, in a rural home near the border city of Harlingen. The gunmen kicked the door down and began shooting at random as soon as they arrived on the scene, Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio said in an interview with Breitbart Texas.
The spray of bullets injured the woman and her child, but the woman’s husband and other children were not harmed in the shooting, Lucio said. He classified the woman’s injuries as minor, but the child remains at a local hospital, where he is listed in stable condition.
“During the robbery the gunmen yelled out ‘policia policia’ which as we all know is the Spanish word for police,” Lucio said.
Preliminary information suggests the robbers attacked the wrong house, as they did not take anything from the property. Sheriff’s investigators are still working to identify the gunmen, who are believed to have arrived in at least three vehicles.
According to Lucio, the family inside the home is not believed to have any relation to criminal activity, and were simply random victims.
As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, home invasions along the Texas border are a different breed of crime, since they often involve gunmen with ties to Mexican drug cartels storming houses to steal drug loads, or abduct human trafficking victims from a rival crew.