Tijuana violence

Mexican soldiers flank a suspect behind a table of weapons confiscated during the shootout, which left one soldier and three suspected drug gang members dead.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Two boys on their way to school look through a shattered window at pools of blood inside the Tijuana house where the shootout occurred.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Razor wire fortifies the high concrete perimeter of Secondary School 25 in Tijuana. When students returned for afternoon classes after visiting the house where the shootout occurred, teachers had trouble getting their attention: They were showing off their cellphone pictures of the carnage.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

A mortician from a funeral home across the street waits outside the Tijuana morgue.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

A simple shrine marks the site where two teenage cousins were shot and killed as they sat on the curb outside their home and talked.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

During an all-night wake, adults embrace and children peer into the coffin of 14-year-old Isabel Guzman Morales, who was killed along with her cousin Victor.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Nine-year-old Arturo stares at his late brother, 19-year-old Felipe Alejandro Prado, who was slain along with Isabel Guzman Morales and Victor Corona Morales. Friends suggested that Prado was a drug dealer who fearlessly roamed his Tijuana neighborhood’s dirt streets. An 11-year-old mourner spoke in admiration of the dead teen: “When I grow up I want to be a narco, and get all the women and the money,” he said.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)