Mexico: A boy aged five had his eyeballs gouged out by his own mother in what officials believe to be a drug-fueled ritual

Police arrested the mother and a number of her relatives after police were called to a house in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico. Mexico state prosecutor Isaac Acevedo said that a total of eight people had been detained and that investigators believed the mother herself gouged the boy's eyes out with her fingers. The boy's father was apparently not in the home at the time. The crime appeared to have been part of a ritual, but was not apparently related to the Santa Muerte or Saint Death cult, some of whose followers were recently charged with the sacrificial killings of two 10-year-old boys and a 55-year-old woman in northern Sonora state. Nezahualcoyltl spokesman Fernando Chavez told how the boy's aunt and uncle were also apparently at the house when the adults began using some unspecified drug. Chavez said one witness told police that she had passed out under the influence of drugs and when she regained consciousness, the boy's eyes were gone. The adults have not yet been charged in the case, but are being held pending investigation. Two children and a 17-year-old were also found at the residence. In March 2012, authorities in Sonora state arrested eight people for sacrificing two boys and an adult woman as offerings to Saint Death, an idol usually depicted as a robed skeleton. Followers of the cult include criminals and drug traffickers. While statues of Saint Death are common in many poor Mexican neighborhoods, Chavez said that no altar or statue of the figure was found in the Nezahualcoyotl home. Mexico's worst case of ritual sacrifice came with the notorious narco-satanicos killings of the 1980s. Fifteen bodies, many of them with signs of ritual sacrifice, were unearthed at a ranch outside the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.