Tiffany Young-Hartley: 'No, I will not go to Mexico'

October 13, 2010 1:38 PM
The Monitor


ZAPATA — The governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Eugenio Hernandez Flores, has invited Tiffany Young-Hartley to go to Miguel Aleman and file a formal complaint about the alleged slaying of her husband, David Michael Hartley, on the Mexican side of Falcon Reservoir.

The district attorney’s office for the Falcon Reservoir area is based in Miguel Aleman.

Ruben Dario Rios Lopez, spokesman for the Tamaulipas attorney general, reiterated that his office needs more details from Young-Hartley about what happened in the Sept. 30 incident.

He assured that a security escort would be provided to her while in Mexico.

"We guarantee her safety," he said Tuesday after confirming that the Tamaulipas state police commander heading the investitgation into her husband's disappearance had been killed in the same region where he wants Young-Hartley to go.

The 29-year-old woman was asked on NBC's Today show Wednesday if she was considering the invitation.

"No. No, I will not go to Mexico," she said on the program. "We have filled out the paperwork that they told us that we had to fill out. We spent 4 1/2 hours at their office (the Mexican Consulate in McAllen) and we were assured that they were going to get the paperwork to Mexico City, to the authorities there, and they were going to be taking them to Reynosa that same day."

Young-Hartley told the Today show that she fears for her own safety if she were to go to Mexico.

"Yeah, we're all under agreement that that is not a wise decision," she said. "Who knows what would happen if I do go over there?"

Hartley, 30, of McAllen, is widely believed dead after what his wife has described as an attack by cartel "pirates" on the Mexican side of the binational waterway.

She has said three boats of gunmen opened fire on them as the couple were riding two personal watercraft, fatally shooting her husband in the head. She has explained that they were sightseeing at a partially submerged church in Old Guerrero, despite a Sept. 10 warning from the U.S. State Department to defer unnecessary travel to Tamaulipas due to "recent violent attacks and persistent security concerns."

The Texas Department of Public Safety has been warning the public since May to stay on the U.S. side of Falcon Reservoir after reports of gunmen in boats robbing fishermen on the Mexican side of the waterway.

In a media blitz that has brought widespread attention to the case, Young-Hartley, 29, has appeared on all the major TV networks and cable news outlets over the past week, presenting a harrowing account of being forced to flee for her life to the U.S. shore of the lake after she tried in vain to get her husband’s limp body onto her SeaDoo watercraft.

Skepticism about that account has also been widespread, however, after Mexican officials last week questioned her version of events, saying they had found no evidence of the purported attack or his remains.

Tuesday, the severed head of Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, the Tamaulipas state police commander heading the Mexican investigation into Hartley's disappearance, was delivered in a suitcase to a Mexican army post in Miguel Aleman.

Rios, the spokesman for the state attorney general, did not have any details about Flores' death but assured that it had nothing to do with the Hartley probe.

“The murder of the commander has nothing to do with the investigation of the disappearance and search for David Hartley in Falcon Lake,â€