Mexican mayor fears massacre of 16 was random

The dead included at least eight teenagers, the youngest a 13-year-old girl.

Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said police were pursuing all lines of investigation. But he said none of the victims of the attack Saturday night had criminal records, and the teenagers were "good kids, students, athletes."

He said he feared violence was reaching levels of brutality shocking even for Ciudad Juarez, which faces El Paso, Texas, and has become one of the world's deadliest cities amid rampant battles between drug gangs fighting for turf and smuggling routes north.

"There is no logical explanation, a concrete reason for this event. This is something that worries us, gratuitous or random criminal acts," Reyes told MVS Radio. "It goes way beyond what had been happening and puts Ciudad Juarez in even greater danger."

Witnesses and relatives said armed men in two trucks blocked off a dead end street in Villas de Salvarcar, a neighborhood of modest cinderblock homes partly surrounded by a fence topped by barbed wire. The gunmen opened fire at three houses, ending their rampage at one home where young people had been gathered for a party.

Ten people were found dead at the scene and six died at hospitals.

One father rushed into the third home after seeing the gunmen and warned the teenagers to flee, according to Mari Cruz, who lost a son and nephew in the attack, and who heard the details from a girl who survived by hiding in a closet. The father was shot at the entrance and the gunmen forced the young people into a corner of the house before shooting them.

She said her son, Jose Luis Aguilar Camargo, and his cousin, Alberto Soto Camargo, both 19, were students at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez.

"Who did it? Why such hate?" Cruz wailed as tearful neighbors tried to comfort her outside her house. "They were just boys who were not in any gangs."