A Mexican drug cartel blamed for the deaths of nine people has been ordered to pay over $4 billion in a ruling handed down by a federal magistrate judge in North Dakota.
The $1.5 billion judgment, issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Clare Hochhalter, will be automatically tripled under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act, bringing the judgment’s amount to $4.6 billion. The money will be given to people who sued the Juarez cartel after the plaintiffs lost family members, three women and six children who were members of an offshoot Mormon community, in a 2019 attack, the Bismarck Tribune reported Thursday.
“The horror that my children experienced and my entire family has been through as the result of the Nov. 4, 2019, killing of (wife) Dawna Langford and my two children by the Juarez cartel will never, ever be made right,” David Langford said. “We went into a United States courtroom in North Dakota seeking some acknowledgment of and measure of justice for the trauma inflicted on our family, and we received it.”
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LeBaron’s husband, Howard Miller, and Christina Langford’s husband, Tyler Johnson, were living in North Dakota at the time of the attack. The families of the dead relatives filed civil lawsuits in 2020 that were eventually consolidated into one suit, the outlet reported.
Maria Rhonita LeBaron and four of her children, Howard, 12, Krystal, 10, and 8-month-old twins Titus and Tiana, along with Christina Langford, Dawna Langford, and her two children, Trevor, 11, and Rogan, 2, were attacked about 90 miles south of the U.S. border on Nov. 4, 2019, when 100 cartel gunmen split into two groups and fired hundreds of rounds into three vehicles from a distance, according to court documents. The shooters then approached the vehicles and set them on fire, “a signature move” of the organization, court documents claim.
The Juarez cartel and its armed wing La Linea are both designated by the U.S. government as “a significant foreign narcotics trafficker,” according to court documents. The end goal of the cartel’s attack was to take back territory from a rival drug organization, according to the documents.
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The cartel did not respond to the published summons or have representation at the trial.
