Thread: MEX: Member of Prominent Business Family Killed in TJ

Member of prominent business family shot to death

By Omar Millán González 12:06 p.m. January 23, 2009

TIJUANA — A member of one of the most prominent business families in northern Mexico was shot to death early Friday in what may have been a kidnapping attempt, state authorities said.

Rafael Fimbres Hernández, 57, was shot in the chest while driving his car in the exclusive neighborhood of Lomas Hipódromo about 7:30 a.m., the state Attorney General's Office reported.

He then crashed his Audi A4 into another car and was barely alive when police arrived. He was transported to the General Hospital, where he was declared dead.

The state agency said its investigation would focus on the attack being a kidnapping attempt, something the victim's family confirmed at the hospital. The family declined to comment further.

The victim was the nephew of José Fimbres Moreno, whose family founded one of the city's first supermarkets, called Calimax, in 1949.

Over the decades, the family built a business empire that now includes more than 100 supermarkets and Smart and Final franchises in Baja California and Sonora.

The family is iconic in Baja California, where it also founded private educational institutions.
José Fimbres Moreno, who died last year at 78, worked to improve the city's image. That image has been battered in the last year as drug cartels have carried out a bloody war to control trafficking routes in the border region.

That conflict, and the Mexican government's effort to quell it, resulted in a record number of murders in the city last year, 843, and unleashed a wave of kidnappings.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/ ... ndex=41994

Maybe now the spineless mexican legislature will reinstate the death penalty in mexico and stop being soft on criminals? Wait, never mind, that means the powers that be need to get out of bed with the narcos.