Friends and family of murdered Mexico surfers say the men weren’t reckless, they were nature lovers
Family and friends of the three surfers killed in Mexico say they are frustrated at those claiming the men were reckless for traveling in remote Baja California — when actually the region has attracted surfers from southern California, and all over the world, for decades.
“They have been doing what so many surfers have been doing for years,” said Kara, who was friends and neighbors with Callum Robinson, an Australian who lived in San Diego.
Callum, 33 and his brother Jake Robinson, 30, along with their friend, Carter Rhoad, 30, of San Diego, were shot in the head execution style by car thieves on a surfing trip to Baja, according to Mexican authorities.
Kara spoke to Callum and Jake’s mother, Debra Robinson, after their deaths and told her how she’d personally camped over a dozen times in the exact location where the men were staying when they were killed – and how she had traveled even further down the peninsula to more remote areas with only two other women with her.
“[Their mom] told me that it was so comforting to know that it was something I had done many times,” Kara, who asked for her last name not to be published, told The Independent.
The 35-year-old said Ms Robinson told her that in the day since her sons disappearance she had encountered people who were “insinuating that her boys should have ‘known better’ or that they were doing something they shouldn’t have.”
“I think it’s important to her that people understand that they weren’t doing anything wrong, or that they were being irresponsible,” she said. “This was a situation of just pure evil and lack of value for human life.”
The parents of the brothers’ friend Carter Rhoad have not yet publicly spoken. The 30-year-old was set to get married in August after proposing to his girlfriend last year. The couple’s engagement from July 2023 was the final post on the American surfer’s Facebook page.
His heartbroken fiancée and many of the trio’s loved ones have since talked with a man who went through a similar tragedy and are taking comfort in his words.
Further south down the peninsula, Ron Gomez Hoff, who is known as “Baja Gringo,” is at the heart of information sharing for the region.
His Facebook group TalkBaja, which began as an online forum when he moved to the area over 20 years ago, and is where news of the surfers’ disappearance first broke when the Australians’ mother posted a plea for help.
Hoff says it’s his own personal experience of being attacked in 2011, in which he and his Mexican wife were left for dead, that has connected him to the surfers’ grieving loved ones.
“I have spoken to dozens and dozens of their family members – including the fiancée of the American, Carter, and it’s just heart wrenching,” he told The Independent. “It got to me. Because it made me relive what we went through.”
Following the murders of the surfers, he wrote an editorial for TalkBaja about his own horrific experience, detailing how he was beaten unconscious with a crowbar and how the men slit his wife’s throat and tossed her off the cliff in a case of extreme violence near his home in San Quintín, Baja California. Miraculously, both of them survived – and because of the community they found in Baja, they stayed.
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