Callum and Jake Robinson, Jack Rhoad: Remembering three surfers killed in Mexico

Two Australian brothers were on the “trip of a lifetime” with an American friend when they were murdered in a suspected carjacking in Mexico.

The brothers, 30-year-old Jake Robinson and his 33-year-old brother Callum, were near the city of Ensenada when they disappeared on April 27.

The third victim was identified as Jack Carter Rhoad, 30, of San Diego, California.

Their bodies were found in a well with gunshot wounds to the head.

A fourth set of human remains found in the well was believed to have no connection to the incident in the northern Mexican state of Baja California, a popular tourist destination also plagued by cartel violence.

Relatives of the three men identified their bodies on Sunday after traveling to Mexico and meeting local officials there.

Three people have been arrested in connection with her death. Mexican authorities believe they attacked the victims after they resisted the theft of their pickup truck.

Here’s what we know about the victims.

Callum Robinson, the oldest of the victims, was a member of the Australian national lacrosse team and lived in San Diego, just across the US-Mexico border from Baja California.

He graduated from Stevenson University in Maryland in 2015.

Callum is also diabetic, his mother Debra Robinson noted while asking for help finding her missing sons on Facebook.

His girlfriend Emily Horwath posted several pictures of the couple on Instagram after his death was announced.

“My heart is shattered into a million pieces,” she wrote. “I’m at a loss for words at the moment.”

In a statement posted online, Stevenson University athletics director Brett Adams wrote that Callum was “an outstanding student, an outstanding athlete and an even better friend.”

“We are all so grateful that he was a part of our lives,” his former coach Paul Cantabene said in the statement. “He led an extraordinary life, but the most impressive thing about Callum is what a loyal friend he was. Once you were his friend, you were a friend for life.”

A friend of Callum’s, Hayley Jacobs, told Australia’s Nine News that he had “lit up a room” and added that he hoped to return to Australia at some point.

“I asked him about his goals in life and he just said he wanted to come back to Australia, start a family and grow,” she added.

Ms Jacobs said she became concerned after not hearing from Callum at the start of his trip to Mexico. She saw him on the day he left.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I think he’s mad at me,” she recalled. “Like something’s wrong.”

Callum’s younger brother Jake left Australia about two weeks before the incident. He was an avid traveler who documented his travels, including a two-month visit to Indonesia last year, on Instagram.

The two attended the Coachella music festival in California together before crossing the state border into Mexico.

After the trip, Jake planned to take a job at a hospital in Geelong, a port city in Victoria state about 40 miles (65 km) from Melbourne.

He had reportedly previously worked at various regional hospitals in Australia.

A friend of Jake’s, Jenny Nguy, paid tribute to him on social media, saying she “can’t stop thinking about you, your smile, your laugh, your kindness.”

“I can’t stop crying thinking about how your parents must feel,” she wrote.

Mr. Carter Rhoad, a friend of Callum, lived in San Diego and had been employed by a technology services company in the city since December 2019.

In 2012, he founded a clothing company, Loma Apparel.

Between 2014 and 2015, he played professional football for Deportivo Mixto in Guatemala’s top national league.

He previously volunteered on humanitarian trips to South Africa, Guatemala and Mexico.

On a GoFundMe page, a friend of the Rhoad family, Lee Penland, wrote that Mr. Carter Rhoad’s relatives were going through “an unimaginably difficult time.”

“Their presence brought immeasurable joy, love and kindness to those around them and left a mark on our lives,” Penland wrote of the three men.