Zindell Brown's family breaks silence on Mexico kidnapping victim's chilling warning before four Americans were ambushed

FAMILY of a man who was killed in a horror kidnapping in Mexico has shared the chilling warning he gave before his death.

Zindell Brown was one of four Americans who traveled to Mexico so that one of them could undergo a medical procedure.

The group entered the country in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates on Friday.

Not long after they got to Mexico, a video emerged on social media of men with assault rifles loading four people into the bed of a white pickup.

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“This is like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from,” Zindell's sister Zalandria Brown told AP News.

The family watched the recording in horror after Zindell and his friends were attacked.

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“To see a member of your family thrown in the back of a truck and dragged, it is just unbelievable," she said.

Zindell was accompanying a friend for the surgery and had expressed weariness over visiting Mexico's Matamoros region, which is known for its high levels of crime and violence. 

“Zindell kept saying, ‘We shouldn’t go down,’” Zalandria said.

Zindell lives in Myrtle Beach and is “extremely close” with the friends with whom he traveled down to Mexico. 

Zalandria revealed that the group traveled together in order to help split driving duties. 

The video of the group’s capture showed men with assault rifles loading four people into the back of a pickup truck.

While one victim appeared to be alive and sitting up, the others looked wounded or dead. 

On Tuesday, the victims were discovered in a wooden shack that was being guarded by a man who was taken into custody, Tamaulipas Gov. Américo Villarreal said.

Zindell and Shaeed Woodard, 33, were found dead.

The survivors, Latavia McGee and Eric James Williams, were rushed to Valley Regional Medical Center.

A passerby in the area spoke anonymously and shared some details of the violent encounter.

They said that a white minivan was hit by another vehicle near an intersection, where shots were fired. 

“All of a sudden they (the gunmen) were in front of us,” the bystander said.

“I entered a state of shock, nobody honked their horn, nobody moved. Everybody must have been thinking the same thing, ‘If we move they will see us, or they might shoot us.’” 

She said that a woman who was able to walk was forced into the back of a truck and that another person was carried in.

“The other two they dragged across the pavement, we don’t know if they were alive or dead,” the bystander said.

Attorney General Irving Barrios said that no ransom was demanded at any point and affirmed it was likely a case of mistaken identity.

Ken Salazar, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, had previously shared the news of the abduction, revealing that an innocent Mexican woman was also killed in the shootout.

Jose Guadalupe, 24, was detained on Tuesday in the border city of Matamoros near Texas, where the kidnapping and killings took place.