Officials identified the U.S. citizen murdered while visiting Mexico as a tourist during the Christmas holiday as a city administrator from California. Gunmen killed the Californian in the Mexican coastal state of Guerrero. The state of Guerrero has become a hotspot for cartel violence in recent years.

Doug Bradley, the administrative services director for the city of Imperial Beach, California, was killed in the Mexican beach resort of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. His death came one day before his 50th birthday, the City of Imperial Beach wrote in a prepared statement.

A news release by the Guerrero Attorney General’s Office revealed that Douglas “N” (Mexican authorities do not release last names) is a U.S. tourist who died after being shot three times. Mexican authorities revealed that the U.S. tourist frequently visited the area. Details of the shooting remain scarce. However, Imperial Beach officials quoted Mexican news reports stating that Bradley was shot during a robbery gone wrong. Preliminary information points to Bradley having been shot in the early hours December 28.

Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo is less than 150 miles away from the famed beach resort town of Acapulco, Guerrero. As Breitbart Texas has reported, Guerrero, and its famed resort city of Acapulco have become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war where rival criminal organizations seek to take over lucrative shipping ports, drug production areas and the distribution of drugs in tourist hotspots. The violence in Guerrero escalated to the level that city morgue officials went on strike earlier this year due to the mounting number of unclaimed corpses that had overfilled the building’s capacity.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com.

Brandon Darby is managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and Stephen K. Bannon. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.