The night when 43 students disappeared in Mexico: A timeline of key events

IGUALA, Mexico (AP) — Ulises Martínez is still uncomfortable in this city, even though it's been 10 years since 43 of his fellow students from a rural teachers college were abducted here.

Martínez was in his third year at the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa, an institute known for its radical social justice activism about 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Iguala in the southern Mexico state of Guerrero.

The students who disappeared on Sept. 26, 2014, had commandeered five buses in Iguala that they planned to drive to Mexico City to attend the commemoration of the massacre of nearly 300 people by government forces during a student protest in 1968.

The Mexican government has determined that the Rural Normal School students were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel, but many questions about what happened to them remain.

Martínez has reconstructed a timeline as part of his personal commitment to find justice. Here is what he recalls:

At Ayotzinapa, students get word that their classmates have problems in Iguala and head for the city in two vans.

The highway is empty, but at an intersection about 16 kilometers (10 miles) from Iguala, armed men in a pickup truck block the road. “Seeing that, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Martínez said.

The student who is driving hits the gas and drives around the roadblock. No shots are fired.

On the road into Iguala, they see one of the five buses their classmates had taken. It's been torn apart. Its tires have been punctured, its windows broken and its luggage compartments opened. They also see a handful of first-year students running away. When they turn around to pick them up, they're gone. At the same time, they receive desperate phone calls from other attacked students who try to describe where they are so that Martínez and his companions can go pick them up.

Martínez and the others arrive at the terminal where the students had first taken the buses. They ask taxi drivers there to bring them to a place that matches the students' descriptions, but the drivers refuse, saying they've been forbidden from going there.

Driving around downtown Iguala, the students find three buses, all shot up. Some students are there and crying. “They couldn’t comprehend what had happened,” Martínez said.

Martínez climbs aboard one of the buses, where he finds puddles of blood and seats pocked with bullet holes.

"It looked really bad,” he said. “We were waiting for authorities, but no one arrived.”

Confusion reigns. Students guard the site, worried that someone will try to remove the buses or pick up the bullet casings. They call a local news outlet.

During an impromptu news conference, Martínez walks over to take a photo of a puddle of blood left from where witnesses said a student was shot in the head. A red vehicle rolls up slowly, and some men dressed in black get out.

“One kneeled,” Martínez said. “First he fired into the air and then he started shooting point-blank.”

Martínez freezes in shock. A news reporter trips over him and they both fall to the ground.

Martínez then hides behind a bus wheel. Someone shouts to run. One student runs off alone and another is shot in the jaw and begins to bleed heavily.

When the shooting stops, a woman tells them to take him to a nearby hospital. “They’re going to kill you,” she says.

Martínez and his companions will later learn that two students were killed at the scene.

The students enter a small clinic, where nurses allow a wounded student to sit but don't treat him.

Martínez and a classmate who hails from Iguala climb to the clinic's roof to see if they’ve been followed. Martínez calls his father to say goodbye in case he doesn’t survive.

Two army trucks pull up. Martínez’s classmate wants to jump off the roof. Martínez says no, it will be safer at a nearby army base. But his classmate says that's not true.

Soldiers, drug traffickers, police, “They’re all the same,” the other student warns.

The soldiers gather everyone downstairs. They tell the students to identify themselves in a notebook, warning them not to give fake names. The soldiers then receive a call and leave, but say the police are on their way to pick the students up.

The students flee before police arrive. They persuade a cab driver to take their wounded classmate to the hospital, while the rest run down the street, eventually finding a house where 30 students who survived the attack in Iguala have taken refuge.

“I hid between a water tank and a washing machine,” Martínez said. “I found a wooden rosary and put it on.”

A girl moves Martínez and five others to another house to hide. No one sleeps.

Students give statements to state investigators. One heads out to look for the classmates who are still missing.

A gruesome photograph of Julio Cesár Mondragón, the student who ran off alone when gunfire broke out, begins to circulate: His face has been ripped off.

Martínez is sent to keep an eye on injured classmates at the hospital. He stays for four days, sleeping on a sheet of cardboard on the floor.

The night of terror is over, but a new nightmare is about to begin: Martínez and others will soon find out the full, terrifying scope of the attack. And they will spend the next 10 years fighting to find answers.

Posters of the 43 missing students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School hang on the roadside, seen from the bus of their families who are traveling from Tixtla, Guerrero state, to the capital to protest for justice 10 years since their disappearance, Sunday, Aug. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

Ulises Martinez, a former student of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, walks under the bridge where two of the buses that his missing classmates commandeered were attacked 10 years ago when he was a student there, in Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

The Clinica Medica Santa Fe medical center stands in Iguala, Mexico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. After the 2014 attack on students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, survivors were initially taken here but fled by taxi to a nearby hospital after hearing police were coming, according to fellow student Ulises Martínez. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

First-year student Jesus Castro Rafaela walks inside the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School where a sign memorializes Julio Cesar Mondragon Fontes, a student who died on the night that 43 fellow students went missing, in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, Mexico, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

Trash lays at the dump in Cocula, near Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. Over the years, authorities have offered different explanations of the fate of the 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School who went missing 10 years ago, and the current justice department refutes the story about the incineration of their bodies at this dump. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

Ulises Martinez, a former student of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, stands at a monument honoring his slain schoolmates Julio Cesar Ramirez and Daniel Solis Gallardo, at the site where their bodies were recovered 10 years prior in Iguala, Mexico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

Photos of 43 students who have been missing for 10 years cover the stairs at their former Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, Mexico, Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

People walk outside the bus terminal in Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. Ten years ago, about 100 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School commandeered buses to drive themselves to a protest in the capital, but were attacked and 43 of them went missing. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the union stronghold of Flint, Michigan, on Friday as she battles with Donald Trump for working-class voters who could tip the scales in this year’s election.

Her appearance in the battleground state comes the day after U.S. dockworkers suspended their strike in hopes of reaching a new contract, sparing the country a damaging episode of labor unrest that could have rattled the economy.

Meanwhile, Trump is heading to Georgia to appear with Gov. Brian Kemp, the latest sign that he’s patched up his rocky relationship with the top Republican in a key battleground state.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

President Joe Biden said Friday that he was confident the upcoming election would be free and fair - but he’s not sure it will be peaceful.

Biden made a surprise appearance in the White House press briefing room to discuss the strong jobs report that he called “incredible news,” and he took some questions. He was asked about how he was feeling about the upcoming election.

“I’m confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” he said. “The things that Trump has said - and the the things that he said last time, when he didn’t like the outcome of the election -- were very dangerous.”

Trump still falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen.

Biden was also asked, as he left the room, whether he was going to reconsider running for president.

“I’m back in” he joked, and the reporters all laughed.

Election experts during a virtual panel held by the National Task Force on Election Crises on Friday acknowledged that western North Carolina officials are still in the early phases of assessing how hurricane damage will affect voting.

The process has been delayed with bridges and roads compromised and emergency crews still actively working to rescue stranded residents and provide people with basic supplies, said Robert Orr, a retired North Carolina Supreme Court Justice who co-leads the North Carolina Network for Fair, Safe and Secure Elections.

Paying for last-minute election changes could pose a challenge, Orr said. Most North Carolina election funding happens locally, and most county election budgets are already diminished because they had to reprint ballots to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name, he said.

Most North Carolina residents are still focused on basic survival and recovery over voting, said Anne Tindall, special counsel of the nonprofit Protect Democracy.

Four people intentionally voted twice in Michigan’s summer primary election, the state attorney general said Friday as she announced felony charges against the suburban Detroit residents as well as public employees accused of enabling it to happen.

Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against the St. Clair Shores residents as well as three assistant clerks who are accused of enabling it to happen. Nessel called it “shocking and simply unheard of.” Nessel said four people who had already cast absentee ballots for the Aug. 6 primary showed up to vote in St. Clair Shores on the day of the election.

It’s possible to cancel an absentee ballot but not on Election Day.

The extra votes did not affect race results, she said.

Casey and Biden are allies and friends. Biden hasn’t done much campaigning since he left the 2024 race over the summer and Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him at the top of the ticket.

The president will also travel to Wisconsin where he’ll talk about efforts by his administration to replace lead pipes. That’s something Biden has continued to do — talk publicly about his administration’s successes and his record in office. He has told his team to “run through the tape.”

Elon Musk will join Donald Trump at his rally Saturday in Butler, the Pennsylvania city where the Republican presidential nominee survived an assassination attempt earlier this year.

“I will be there to support!” Musk wrote on his social platform X on Thursday in a retweet of Trump’s own promotion of the rally. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO will be among special guests in attendance, Trump’s campaign confirmed Friday.

The event will mark the first time the billionaire businessman appears publicly at a campaign event for the former president since endorsing him. Musk has supercharged his support for Trump in recent months and has become personally more invested in politics — even agreeing to lead a government efficiency commission if Trump wins reelection.

Saturday’s rally will take place at the same property where a gunman’s bullets grazed Trump’s right ear and killed his supporter, Corey Comperatore. The shooting left multiple others injured.

The Democratic presidential nominee has already been to Georgia, where she helped distribute meals and spoke with families in Augusta. More than 200 people died in the powerful storm that spread out across the Southeast, causing devastation. President Joe Biden, too, has traveled to areas hard-hit by the storm.

From Georgia, Harris said she and Biden have been paying attention “from the beginning to what we need to do to make sure the federal resources hit the ground as quickly as possible, and that includes what was necessary to make sure that we provided direct federal assistance. And that work has been happening.”

Their travel comes as Republican Donald Trump is falsely claiming the federal government wasn't doing enough to help affected people in Republican areas. Biden was angered by the suggestion, calling it a lie. He said partisan politics should not be part of this conversation.

Former President Barack Obama is planning to hit key swing states to boost Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the White House, starting on Thursday in Pittsburgh.

The Harris campaign says Obama will travel around the country over the final 27 days ahead of the election. It noted that the former president and Harris have a friendship that goes back 20 years, from when they first met while he was running for Senate.

Harris was also an early supporter of Obama’s 2008 presidential bid and knocked on doors for him in Iowa ahead of its caucus that led off voting in the Democratic primary.

In his speech at the Democratic convention in August, Obama said Harris “wasn’t born into privilege. She had to work for what she’s got.”

“And she actually cares about what other people are going through,” the former president added then.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump dances at a campaign event at the Ryder Center at Saginaw Valley State University, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in University Center, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she arrives on Air Force Two at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Romulus, Mich., Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)