A participant in last year’s events mourned Galton’s death — suggesting that he had been targeted by cartels because he was competing with them — but said he was not afraid to return to the resort town in the state of Guerrero, which had a homicide rate in 2017 of 64.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, more than twice that of Chicago.

“You gotta have common sense about it, but I’d say it’s safer than any big city I’ve lived in in the U.S., like way safer than Chicago or something like that,” Galton said in the March 2017 interview, titled “John and Lily on the Run.”