ZAPATA, Texas — Blood smeared on Tiffany Hartley’s life jacket is nearly invisible to the naked eye but is among the evidence that corroborates her description of an attack by Mexican pirates that left her husband dead and ended with her fleeing for miles across open water, their attackers in pursuit.
Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr., whose department is leading the criminal investigation into the apparent death of Loveland native David Hartley, on Thursday detailed for the first time some of the evidence that backs up a story that has been the subject of rampant speculation.
“I just believe her,” Gonzalez said late in the afternoon, standing at the boat ramp south of town where the Hartleys set out on their ill-fated trip to the far reaches of Falcon Reservoir, several miles into Mexico.
Various authorities in Mexico have openly questioned Tiffany Hartley’s story, and public officials along the U.S. side of the border have been asked repeatedly whether they think it is true.
Gonzalez came to her defense Thursday, first at a news conference called by three congressmen who visited this border town to discuss the ongoing effort to find David Hartley’s body and return it to the United States.
“We have to rely on the law enforcement officials,” U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said at the news conference, where the first question centered on speculation about what really happened in an area known as Rio Salado, where a Catholic church rises from the water in the flooded city of Old Guerrero.
The area is controlled by the Zeta drug cartel.
Sheriff backs up story
Tiffany Hartley told sheriff’s investigators that the couple had ridden their personal watercraft into the area of Old Guerrero, which was flooded after the Falcon Dam was built in the 1950s. There, she said, they were approached by armed men in three fishing boats.
David Hartley got behind her, she told investigators, and they were fleeing when gunfire erupted. She looked back and saw him fall off his WaveRunner, turned around, jumped into the water and found him with a severe head wound. She tried to pull him onto her Wave Runner but concluded that he was dead and fled amid gunfire before being chased several miles to the shore in Zapata.
In his most extensive statements yet about the nature of the evidence in the case, Gonzalez also said that Border Patrol officers saw the couple eating lunch at Subway shortly before the incident — information that matches exactly with Tiffany Hartley’s description of the couple’s day.
In addition, he said, an independent witness with no connection to the Hartleys told investigators that he looked out onto the lake from Zapata to see Tiffany Hartley whipping across the water on her Wave Runner and a boat with several men in it pursuing her.
The blood on the life jacket, which has been sent to a crime lab for DNA testing, is faint — consistent with the vest having been wet when it was stained, Gonzalez said.
And, he said, three earlier attacks on the lake, reported in April and May, unfolded in almost exactly the same way that Tiffany Hartley described her ordeal, he said. No one was injured in any of those incidents.
Finally, Gonzalez alluded to other unspecified evidence that he declined to make public that also backs up her statements.
Search intensifies
The effort to locate David Hartley’s body intensified Thursday, Cuellar said. He said Mexican authorities assured him that 60 federal agents were involved in searches both on the shore of the lake near Old Guerrero and in the water. They were using 20 vehicles, three boats and aircraft.
Reporters taken out onto the lake late in the afternoon could see an airplane slowly flying over the reservoir on the Mexican side of the border.
A similar search had begun a day earlier but was called off after members of a drug cartel apparently threatened the law officers.
“It’s not where you’re going out there and it’s the middle of a park and everything’s fine,” Cuellar said. “There are threats.”
Falcon Reservoir is 44 miles long and straddles the border. American law officers do not have the power to enter Mexico, and the effort to get authorities south of the border to initiate a search effort for both David Hartley’s body and his WaveRunner took days.
U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., offered his help to the Hartley family, contacting both the U.S. State Department and members of the Texas congressional delegation as U.S. agencies press the Mexican government on the effort to find Hartley’s body.
The State Department has told Udall’s office that “it is very pleased with the amount of cooperation from the Mexican government,” aides said.
“My heart goes out to David Hartley’s family, and my thoughts are with them during this terrible tragedy,” Udall said Thursday, adding that his office will continue to track what he called a “binational, multi-agency recovery effort.”
Staff writer Michael Riley contributed to this report.
