| The office of U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford, has become involved in a local judge's quest to resolve a large-scale theft that rocked a Mexican destination wedding in November.
Judge Thomas Culver III, of the 240th District Court, has reported that about 20 people had their belongings stolen from a Mexican resort where his daughter was married in late October.
Culver said a group of guests at the Eurostars Blue hotel in Tulum, Mexico, reported on Saturday evening, Oct. 28, that their room safes had been broken into during the wedding.
The thieves took more than $100,000 worth of cash, jewelry and other belongings, said Culver, only hours before most of the victims needed to catch flights home.
Culver said he personally did not lose anything, but since the November wedding he has been speaking with hotel employees and a number of U.S. and Mexican authorities in an attempt to have the stolen items located and returned to the victims.
Culver has been in discussions with U.S. State Department officials based out of Merida, which is close to the resort town of Tulum, and has also spoken with several Mexican authorities about the heist and what he sees as a poor response by executives of the hotel.
Culver said he spoke with Lampson and the Mexican minister of tourism's U.S. office by conference call Wednesday afternoon.
“I wanted to make sure he (Mexican tourism official Eduardo Chaillo) understood this was a larger question than a theft of property,” Culver said.
Word of the theft has negatively affected bookings at the hotel where he stayed, said Culver, and is affecting the reputation of the Mexican Riviera.
He said his immediate goals are to have retrieved property returned to its owners, and he is working toward an arrangement that will not require all victims to travel to Mexico, as some authorities there have mandated.
Furthermore, he said he would like to see the hotel compensate victims whose belongings were not recovered.
News of the wedding heist has been picked up by local media thus far, but it may soon reach a wider audience.
Culver said he and his family are scheduled on Sunday to meet with the crew of the nationally syndicated news magazine program, “Inside Edition.”
From the outset, Culver said a U.S. diplomat in Mexico urged him to keep his family's case in the public eye, in order to place pressure on authorities in Mexico to resolve the situation.
“There are reasons to think that the resorts in the past may have been able to ignore this, but now I think they perhaps understand it may be risky for them to ignore these kinds of crimes in the future,” he said.
Thus far, two men have been arrested, and Mexican authorities say they have found at least some of the loot.
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