Mexican officials confirmed that an infantryman in a Mexican Navy helicopter operating near the Texas border shot and killed three members of a family caught in the crossfire of a fierce cartel gun battle. A woman and two children died from their wounds while the man survived. The battle occurred in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, immediately across the U.S.-Mexico border from Laredo, Texas.

The family was traveling along one of the main boulevards in Nuevo Laredo when they came upon an area where cartel gunmen were carrying out an ambush on Mexican Navy infantrymen or Marinos. As Breitbart Texas reported at the time, members of the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas had been carrying out a series of ambushes against Mexican Navy infantrymen leading to several hours of gun battles that ultimately led to the family being caught in the crossfire. Initial reports pointed to a woman, a man and two young girls dying at the scene. However, it was later revealed that the father of the girls survived the ordeal, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office confirmed.

Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office revealed the new information on the case during a press conference where they confirmed that the family had been shot at from a helicopter. Anselmo Apodaca Sanchez, the head of forensics for Mexico’s Criminal Investigations Agency, revealed the details of the crime scene as he reported that more than 3,000 ammunition rounds were fired during the gun battle near the area where the family was killed.

In response to the firefight, the Mexican Navy deployed a helicopter to provide air support to the troops on the ground. According to Apodaca Sanchez’s statement, the angle of the shots and the trajectory points to the family having been shot from the helicopter and not from the ground.

Nuevo Laredo, a border city immediately south of Laredo, Texas, is considered to be the main stronghold of Cartel Del Noreste and one of their main human and drug smuggling corridors. The CDN has been fighting against their rivals including other Los Zetas factions and the Gulf Cartel in fierce territorial wars throughout the border state of Tamaulipas.

Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Tony Aranda from Nuevo León.