TIJUANA — When San Diego County native George Norman Harrison opened his Tijuana pizzeria in 2007, he plastered the El Mirador neighborhood with fliers and hired a team of delivery boys to zip up and down the shanty-lined hills on motor scooters.
Business was good, and he told his family he liked the low cost of living in Mexico. But the stout, mustachioed former construction worker recognized the dangers and stashed a 9-millimeter handgun in his property, one of four weapons he owned without Mexican permission.
On Feb. 3, three gunmen abducted the 38-year-old U.S. citizen from the pizzeria and held him captive for one month, extracting two ransom payments from his family in San Diego County. Then his captors beheaded him, chopped off his arms and legs and tossed his body in a weed-choked lot beside those of two other men, with a taunting sign warning about "snitches."
The gruesome slaying has left Harrison's family and Mexican authorities at odds over why he was killed.
The Baja California attorney general's office considers Harrison's death another organized-crime slaying, one of about 800 here in the last year. They suspect the pizzeria businesses -- Harrison owned another restaurant near the beach -- were a front for drug trafficking, and they suspect that he crossed the wrong person or owed a drug debt, noting that he had a drug conviction eight years ago.
"He was keeping bad company, and was taken by people they knew," said Assistant Atty. Gen. Rafael Gonzalez.
Harrison's family says Mexican authorities have been too quick to categorize his death as drug-related. Harrison had put his conviction behind him and was targeted because of his business success, say family members who asked that their identities not be revealed for security reasons.
"Business was really good. He was really happy," said one family member. "He was always busy, running around like crazy, bringing supplies, keeping the employees busy."
If Harrison's death is drug-related, it would fit the profile of the vast majority of homicides in Tijuana: a lethal adjusting of accounts among suspected traffickers, gunmen, drug addicts and other criminals who placed themselves in the cross hairs of crime bosses battling for control of the city.
But Tijuana also ranks among the world's most dangerous cities for ransom kidnappings, a situation that has prompted hundreds of middle-class and upper-middle-class Mexican families to flee to the San Diego area.
