Cockfight shooting kills 3 in Texas
Two roosters feel each other out during a cockfight in the vicinity of Dezemitte in Petion Ville, Port-au-Prince, February 23, 2011.
Masked gunmen opened fire at an illegal cockfighting ring in southern Texas early this morning, killing three men and wounding at least eight.
Somewhere between two and four gunmen attacked the crowd at the rooster fight shortly after midnight, according to Reuters, shooting wildly at the spectators as they sat behind a remote farmhouse near McAllen, Texas.
Spectators trampled the shooting victims and evidence as they ran, said Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino to BBC News, who described the site as "a crime scene from hell."
Detectives and crime scene technicians went over the site where the cockfight and shooting occurred, which had a low corrugated metal pavilion and wooden bleachers covered in beer cans and cups, according to the Associated Press.
"It was a massacre," Homer Jasso, the justice of the peace for the area of the county where the shooting took place, said to Fox News. "I haven't seen this kind of violence in the valley here on my watch. This is the first time in my life I've seen something this bad."
Names of the three victims were being withheld until authorities notified the men's families, but they said two of them, ages 49 and 53, were brothers, and the other was 42.
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