ENSENADA, Mexico
Three men who murdered two Australian brothers and their American friend during a surfing trip to Baja California have each been sentenced to 158 years and nine months in prison, closing the court case that followed the 2024 killings of three foreign tourists in Baja California. Reuters reported that a judge in the coastal city of Ensenada handed down the sentences on Friday, citing a judicial source, a week after the same court found Jesús Gerardo García, Irineo Francisco and Ángel Jesús guilty of homicide, aggravated robbery, robbery with violence and vehicle theft with violence. Sky News reported the same verdicts and sentences, and the BBC reported the families' statements during the trial. According to Reuters, the judge also ordered the men to pay compensation to the victims' families.
A surf trip that ended in a well
Jake Robinson and Callum Robinson, brothers from Perth, Australia, and their friend Jack Carter Rhoad, from the United States — all in their early thirties — were travelling Mexico's Pacific coast in late April 2024, camping at remote beaches near Ensenada, a city with a long-standing reputation as a welcoming surf destination. They had crossed into Mexico from the United States barely 36 hours earlier when they disappeared on April 27, 2024, from a remote beachside campsite. For a week, their families and authorities searched. On May 3, their bodies were found dumped in a remote clifftop well about 15 metres (50 feet) deep, each bearing gunshot wounds to the head. The pickup truck they had been travelling in was found burned, several kilometres away.
Prosecutors alleged the attack began as a robbery. State prosecutor María Elena Andrade said at the time that the attackers wanted to steal the tyres from the foreigners' pickup truck and that the victims resisted. In court, according to Sky News, the prosecution argued the attackers "intentionally surprised the surfers and shot them with firearms, taking their lives," and the judge ruled that the three defendants acted with premeditation. That ruling — that the killings were planned rather than a robbery that spiralled — underpins the length of the sentences, which amount to life in prison several times over under Mexican law.
The trial, and the fourth defendant
The three men sentenced on Friday were not the only people convicted over the attack. In a separate trial in November last year, Ary Gisell Silva — the former girlfriend of García, the alleged ringleader, who is known by the alias "El Kekas" — was sentenced to 20 years in prison after admitting she instigated and participated in the robbery of the tourists' belongings that led to their murders. At least four people were arrested in connection with the crime in the weeks after the bodies were found.
The guilty verdicts in the main trial were delivered last week, and the Robinsons' parents, Martin and Debra Robinson, were in Mexico for them before returning to Australia. Speaking outside court after the verdict, Martin Robinson said it was "a significant moment in our long and painful journey to seek justice for our beautiful sons, Callum and Jake, and their friend Jack Carter Rhoad, whose lives were so cruelly taken from them in 2024." According to the BBC, Debra Robinson told the court during the trial that her sons' murders had taken "the future we had imagined with them."
"These men will never hurt anyone else again"
Sky News reported that the families followed Friday's sentencing hearing remotely, by video link. Page Rhoad, Jack Carter Rhoad's mother, spoke after the hearing and put the families' position in terms no sentence could soften: "There will never be justice for the loss of a child, but these men will never hurt anyone else again." The Robinsons likewise followed the sentencing from Australia, having returned home after the guilty verdicts. According to ABC, the defence has said it intends to appeal the sentences, which means the case may not be entirely finished even now — though sentences of more than a century and a half leave little practical room for the outcome to change for the three men themselves.
A town that had to answer for it
The murders landed hard in Ensenada and in Baja California's surf community, which depends on visiting surfers and prides itself on being safer than the cartel violence associated with other parts of Mexico. After the killings, local surfers gathered in Ensenada to protest the safety situation in the state. Antonio Otañez, president of the Baja California surfers' association, welcomed Friday's outcome, saying "justice has been served," and said the killings had caused a major drop in tourist visits to the region, particularly by surfers. The case drew attention far beyond Mexico: it produced an outpouring of grief and anger in Australia, where the Robinson brothers were widely mourned, and in the United States, and it forced a public reckoning over how three experienced travellers could be killed, apparently at random, within two days of crossing the border.
For the families, Friday's sentences close the longest chapter of that reckoning. The three men convicted of the murders will, in any realistic scenario, spend the rest of their lives in a Mexican prison. What remains — an appeal, the compensation order, and a surf town working to win back the visitors who stopped coming — will play out far from the beach where Jake Robinson, Callum Robinson and Jack Carter Rhoad camped on the last night of their trip. More from the world desk is on the Previously news front.
