SC victims of Mexican kidnapping describe harrowing ordeal to Anderson Cooper on CNN

For a time, they thought they would never get home.

The two Lake City natives who survived being kidnapped by the Gulf drug cartel in Mexico thought they would be shot to death, like the two men traveling with them who they considered their brothers.

For four days, they were held at gunpoint by men wearing red masks, moved from place to place as their kidnappers listened to police radio and tried to stay a step ahead of the law.

In an exclusive interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN, Eric Williams and LaTavia Washington McGee spoke about what happened to them in March.

Childhood friends, Williams and McGee along with Zindell Brown and Shaeed Woodard, traveled to Mexico for McGee to have cosmetic surgery. They said they were followed after they crossed into Mexico, then crashed their car. When they got out, the men were shot.

They were all still alive when they were loaded into the back of a pickup truck, which was widely broadcast on the internet and television. The captors took them to a clinic, but Brown and Woodard died from their injuries.

Woodard’s last words were, “I love y’all. I’m gone.”

Brown was shot twice in the back.

“To hear your brother, somebody who is your friend, who you can call a brother, tell you they love you and know you’re never gonna see them again,” Williams said.

McGee said, “Watching them fight for their life, and there’s nothing you can do.”

They said the captors told them to have sex with each other, but they said they were siblings and McGee was pregnant.

Williams was shot in the legs. He was treated at the clinic with 2x4 lumber fashioned into braces and stitched up. He appeared on Cooper’s show in a wheelchair with braces on his legs.

At one point, McGee heard one of the captors watching something on his phone. She asked if it was them being kidnapped and could she see it. He showed her.

“I just started crying,” she said. “It’s, like, I’m never going home.”

She had no idea it was being broadcast in the United States.

“I just didn’t know our families knew anything that happened to us,” she said.

At one point a man who said he was an American came to them and said he was trying to get his boss to release them. He said they couldn’t bring their brothers back, but they were sorry it happened..

“Somebody made the wrong call, they was high, drunk,” McGee recalled the man saying.

He came back a couple of days later, blindfolded them and loaded them into a truck. They drove around for hours, then were dropped off at a shack, where they were rescued.

McGee and Williams have hired civil rights lawyers, Harry Daniels and Jason Keith.

Daniels has represented myriad families of people who have been shot by police, people beaten while in custody, people alleging excessive use of force in communities as diverse as Austin, Texas, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Last year, he won a $3 million settlement for the family of Andrew Brown Jr. against Pasquotank County in North Carolina. Brown was killed in 2021 while deputies were serving warrants related to drug allegations.

Daniels is based in Atlanta.

Keith of Greensboro, North Carolina, specializes in state and federal criminal law and is the senior partner at Keith & Associates and the founder of NexGenLaw.

He told WFMY television station that Williams has had eight surgeries for gunshot wounds to his legs in Brownsville, where he was taken after he and McGee were rescued.

The Gulf cartel turned over to authorities five of their members believed to be responsible for the kidnapping and deaths.