Photo: Borderreport.com
The deaths of Jack Carter Rhoad, Jake Robinson, and his brother Callum Robinson were the center of one of the most tragic stories of 2024 — three friends on a surf trip south of the border, robbed for their electronic possessions and the wheels on their truck, then killed when they fought back. More than a year has passed now since the murders of the Australian and American surfers made international headlines, and now statues dedicated to the three men have been erected at the site where they were killed.
Salvador Rivera of Border Report says the memorial statues were dedicated on a cliff overlooking the waves at Punta San Jose by the Baja California Surfing Association, which has 400 members from both sides of the border.
“In all the world we have a brotherhood with surfers, so we want to honor our brother surfers from Australia and the U.S.A. That’s the least we can do,” Antonio Otañez, President of the club, told Rivera.
Two of the statues are placed just inches apart, representing the Robinson brothers standing side-by-side. The other statue represents Rhoad. They were made of oak wood in order to sustain the rain and “be here forever,” Otañez says.
A plaque in front of the statues commemorates all three with their names and birthdays. In both Spanish and English it reads:
This monument commemorates the lives of three young surfers who lost their lives on 27, April 2024.
Their passion for surfing and their love of the ocean will forever be remembered.
Live bigger
Shine brighter and
Love harder
Gone but never forgotten.
Some local surfers, including Otañez, have stressed that Punta San Jose has always felt like a safe place to them and their families. Others, however, pointed out that the involvement of foreigners helped bring a reality they live with to light.
“Because this happened to foreigners and there was pressure from the U.S. and Australian governments, they were found in less than a week. But there are a lot of Mexicans who disappear and that’s the irony of this situation. In the same location where they were found, there was a fourth body of a local rancher who was missing for two weeks,” Gino Passalacqua told The Inertia in 2024. “Nobody was looking for him and that’s the case most of the time. There’s a lot of this type of disappearances or murders and not much gets done, or it takes years to solve. So the paddle out and protests that we did were not only for local surfers, it was also for all Mexicans who haven’t been able to find their loved ones.”
