He tried to solve a mystery in Mexico. And was slain.
Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco (in red), pictured here in October 2014 searching for the bodies of 43 slain college students in Mexico, was himself slain over the weekend. Friends say he'd feared being targeted by corrupt Mexican officials because he was working for justice.
When 43 students went missing in rural Mexico last year, Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco tried to find them. They didn't find all the students, but they did discover more than 100 bodies of people killed and randomly buried in drug-related violence.
Jimenez Blanco led a community police program in southern Mexico, but it was his work with the missing students that put him into the spotlight. It also put him at risk. He received death threats.
On Saturday night, someone made good on those threats. Authorities found his body in the back of a car, killed by two gunshot wounds.
"I was terribly sad," says freelance reporter Deborah Bonello. "My husband and I both spent time in his role as this sort of search party leader. And he's been a very outspoken critic of how the government has handled the disappearance of the 43 students and the government's version of the events."
She says Jimenez Blanco feared for his life. But he accepted that danger. "He knew that at some point this might happen," she says. "In Guerrero, there are so many conflicting interests and he was aware that he was challenging those. I think he knew that he may not die of natural causes."
In a BBC interview earlier this year, Jimenez Blanco said that after the killings of the 43 students, 300 families had come forward saying they had missing relatives, too.
"We have been saying from the start that this area is a cemetery," he said at the time.
Bonello, his friend, agrees, saying the hardest part is that the killing has an impact: silence.
"You know it makes you feel like, 'Well I'm just going to keep my mouth shut because if I don't, look what happens to you.'"
The case of the missing 43 students promoted an international outcry. The parents of the students and many other Mexicans still reject the government's version of events. The administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto has insisted the students were killed by gang members on the orders of corrupt local police.