A U.S. Ph.D. student unknowingly “walked into a hornet’s nest” during a research trip to El Chapo’s former territory in Mexico, where he was shot seven times and left to die in a black SUV.
Gabriel Trujillo, a 31-year-old botanist who was engaged to be married and start a family, was on a mission to apply his research of the flowering shrub called the buttonbush, which preserves water quality, enhances wildlife habitat and controls erosion, to build a garden in Mexico and restore the area’s wetlands.
On June 22, authorities found Trujillo’s body in the Mexican state of Sonora, which has descended into trigger-happy madness after Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s 2016 arrest, private investigator Jay Armes III told Fox News Digital.
Three cartels are warring in the country’s northwest state, which has 518 reported murders through May, including two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Caborca Cartel that El Chapo allowed to run simultaneously while he was in power, said Armes III, who works kidnapping cases around the world but specializes in crime in Mexico.
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“Now, you have a situation where you have three cartels, minimum, fighting over the same territory. You also have the head of the Nuvea Genercion Cartel from Jalisco, which is trying to take over the entire country Mexico, dipping their toe in the region,” Armes III said. 
“So this guy went into a war zone at the worst possible time. Instead of just the Sinaloa Cartel patrolling, you have three cartels patrolling the same space, fighting each other and looking for each other’s men and killing whoever doesn’t belong to their group.”
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He believes Trujillo, who was reported missing by his fiancee, Roxanne Cruz-de Hoyos, after she didn’t hear from him since the morning of June 18, was likely stalked by cartel spotters since he crossed over the Arizona border on June 17. 
The spotters, called “falcons” or “halcones” in Spanish, are kids, teenagers, adults, old men on the cartels’ payrolls who use encrypted walkie-talkies to report anything “out of the ordinary,” Armes III said. 
“When a spotter spots someone that doesn’t belong there, they’ll dispatch a patrol or a group of sicarios (hit men) to kick people out,” he said. “When a group of sicarios roll up on you, you’re categorized as a civilian, law enforcement or a rival cartel member.”
“If you’re deemed anything but a regular citizen minding their own business, they’re going to kill you. If you’re a regular citizen, they may rob you for the fun of it.”
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In Trujillo’s case, he believes sicarios thought he was an undercover DEA agent because they didn’t steal his SUV, which they use in their operations, and they didn’t mutilate his body to display as a warning to rival cartels.
“Think about it. If you’re a hit man, and you’re patrolling an area in the middle of nowhere, 65 miles from the border, and you got a guy messing around in the bushes because he’s researching buttonbush with American license plates, and you tell them you’re doing plant research, you think they’re going to believe you?” Armes III said. 
“What I thought was odd was that they killed him and left him in his SUV, instead of pulling him out, killing him, dumping his body on the side of the road and stealing the vehicle,” he said. 
“That tells me they might’ve panicked or one of them in the car thought he was some sort of law enforcement, so they likely machine-gunned him and moved on.”
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The Sonora state prosecutor’s office said in a statement Thursday that it is analyzing evidence “to establish the facts, conditions and causes of the death.” The statement did not give details about what occurred or call Trujillo’s death a homicide.
As of Saturday, there’s been no official update. Armes III said he called a few independent sources in the area, who said it was one of the cartels but who and why remains a mystery.

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