Shawna Forde led an anti-immigration group in an armed robbery that left two dead

This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

An Arizona jury is deliberating on whether to impose the death penalty on a woman who led an anti-immigration group that killed two Mexicans.

Shawna Forde, 43, was found guilty on Monday of instigating a robbery in 2009 on a Mexican family's home which left a nine-year-old girl and her father dead.

Forde carried out the attack with accomplices disguised as police officers in the hope of stealing drugs and money to fund her vigilante activities with a Minutemen group.

The three-week trial in Tucson lifted the lid on the extreme fringes of the Minutemen movement and its barely contained violence against illegal Mexican immigrants.

Forde is a former beautician with a track record of prostitution and theft convictions who began her increasingly strident campaign against immigrants in Washington state.

She moved to Arizona, where the immigration debate is particularly febrile given the volatile nature of its border with Mexico, and in 2007 set up her own vigilante group having broken away from the larger Minutemen civil defence corps.

Her posse, Minutemen American Defense, had as few as 12 members but was driven in an extreme direction by Forde.

She instructed members not to eat Mexican food and told them that she had plans to create a Minutemen stronghold close to the border which would be funded by raids on Mexican drug cartels.

Then on 30 May 2009 Forde led two accomplices to the house of Raul Flores in Aravica, a small town about 10 miles from the Mexican border.

They knocked on the door, pretending to be police officers. When Flores questioned their identity, one of the accomplices shot him several times. The gunman also shot Flores's wife, Gina Gonzalez, who played dead. She survived.

Gonzalez told the jury that the gunman then confronted her daughter, Brisenia, aged 9, and shot two bullets into her head in cold blood.

The alleged gunman, Jason Bush, goes on trial in March and the other alleged accomplice, Albert Gaxiola, the following month. Bush has connections to the white supremacist network Aryan Nations, prosecutors say.

Gonzalez testified that the three attackers returned to the house a second time to "finish her off", but she grabbed a gun and shot Bush in the leg. The prosecution said that DNA from his blood linked him to the scene of the murder, as did other forensic clues relating to Forde.

The defence lawyers told the jury there was no credible evidence linking Forde to the crime.

During the trial, the jury heard of the cowboy mentality of fringe vigilante groups that have massed along the Mexican border in America's increasingly fraught relationship with its southern neighbour.

Ron Wedow, a fellow Minutemen member who knew Forde, told investigators that she had bragged to him she was "gonna change America and raise, raise this to a whole different level, is what she said".

Prosecutors are pressing for the death penalty for Forde, which requires a unanimous decision by jurors.

They will tell the jury that the fact that the murders were carried out for money, and that the youngest victim was only nine, merit the awarding of the ultimate punishment.