RTR4TWE0
Spring breakers dance at a club in Cancun March 7, 2015. reuters

A woman from Colorado was one of five people killed in a stampede that occurred at a music festival in Cancun Monday after a lone gunman fired at someone he was having a verbal altercation with inside. Alejandra Villanueva Ibarra, 18, was trampled to death while attempting to flee from the ensuing chaos on the final night of the BPM Festival, a 10-day annual electronic music festival.

The victim’s brother, Aaron Martinez, said Ibarra, who lived in Denver, wanted to become a school teacher and that she was kind hearted, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday. She is the lone American victim in the shooting.

“We’re still trying to let things sink in and realize that this is true and this is happening,” Martinez told the Daily Mail. “Yesterday morning we spoke — she was talking about how she was having so much fun and can’t wait to come back home and tell us everything about her vacation.”

Martinez created a GoFundMe page after learning about his sister's death so that their family could afford to bring her body home from Mexico for a proper funeral. The campaign raised $11,015 of the $10,000 the family asked for as of Wednesday morning.

The shooting occurred around 2:30 a.m. local time as party-goers were waiting in line to get into the Blue Parrot nightclub where the festival was being held.

Local law enforcement authorities have detained four people in connection to the crime but it remains unclear whether one of those is the shooter. Quintana Roo Prosecutor Miguel Angel Pech Cen told reporters that possible links to terrorism have not been ruled out in the investigation.

Pech said the four other victims who were killed had all been security guards working at the festival. The deceased included two Canadians, one Italian and one Columbian.

In the past 13 years, an average of 827 Americans died of unnatural causes while travelling outside of the country every year, according to a Time Magazine article from March.

RELATED STORIES