DaytonDailyNews.com

EL ZACATON — The house was almost finished. Bit by bit, 20-year-old Conrado Guardado sent money back from Ohio to this tiny town in the desert highlands of northern Mexico.

Now that he is dead, his mother stands on the dirt floor of the unfinished kitchen and wonders what will become of her family.

"I still keep thinking he's going to come back," Guillermina Guardado Davila says. "I know it's impossible, but when I walk in the street I turn around hoping it's him. He was my only son and now I'm left with nothing."

Last month, four relatives from this village, which depends almost entirely on the money its sons and husbands send back from the United States, were brutally murdered in a sparse Sharonville apartment, just over the border from Butler County. They all worked in Mason.

The men — a pair of brothers and an uncle and his nephew — were stabbed in their hearts, most likely while they slept.

The unsolved killings shocked Ohio, but their most profound impact was felt 2,000 miles away in El Zacaton, where four families now wonder how they will survive. Two of the men left wives and young children. All were the principal breadwinners for their families.

"They sustained the family, that was how we got by," said Jose Luis Davila Duenas, older brother of Jose de Jesus and Manuel Davila Duenas, the two brothers. "It's going to be very hard, both sentimentally and economically" An uncle, Primitivo Davila, puts it bluntly: "They are screwed. On all these ranches it's the same. There's nothing."

Seventy-four percent of El Zacaton's 7,500 residents survive on less than $3,000 a year. Migration to the United States began in earnest in the 1980s and has become ritual for teenage boys to follow in their fathers and older brothers north to search for work.

"They turn 15 and they say, 'let's go,'" said Filemon Guardado, mayor of the Villa de Ramos municipality, which includes El Zacaton. Guardado, also the men's uncle, said that while migrants from the area head principally to Texas and Tennessee, Ohio has become a popular destination in recent years. He estimates about 400 migrants from the area are working in Ohio.

The four had been living in Sharonville for nearly three years, working for ABC Precison Masonry & Concrete Inc. in Mason. The older men, Manuel Davila Duenas, 31, and Lino Guardado Davila, 45, who had wives and children, regularly returned to El Zacaton before traveling north again.

The men lived a Spartan lifestyle and sent back to Mexico what they earned. Sharonville police found little in the apartment — some eggs and tortillas in the fridge and an aging TV and stereo. The men slept on the floor.

Sergio Davila Duenas, who lived and worked with his brothers in Ohio before returning to El Zacaton two years ago, said the men worked in Dayton and Columbus before settling in Sharonville. After being repeatedly robbed in their Columbus apartment, he said the workers stopped buying furniture.

"We all had the custom of not buying things, of not treating ourselves to luxuries," he said. "We worked and saved, that's what we did."

Sergio said his 21-year-old brother, Jose, was planning to return to Mexico for Christmas in what would have been his first visit since he left El Zacaton at the age of 14. Family members believe Jose was going to surprise the family with a new truck, a status symbol for many migrants.

Many in El Zacaton believe robbery was the motive of the grisly killings, since the men likely had a large amount of cash in anticipation of a Christmas visit to Mexico. Police found $1,300 in one of the men's wallet.

Family members believe a fifth roommate, a fellow migrant from the border state of Tamaulipas, is involved, a lead that investigators have said they are pursuing.

Other potential motives — racism against the undocumented workers or involvement with drugs or criminal activity — are quickly rejected in El Zacaton, where the cousins had a reputation for being tireless workers.

"They just went to work in the fields and went home," remembered Victor Manuel Gonzalez, an El Zacaton landowner. Police found no drugs or alcohol in the men's' apartment.

Many in the village hope that the justice system will function better in Ohio than it does in Mexico, where violent executions regularly go unsolved and even uninvestigated.

"We just want them to punish the guilty person," said Jose Luis Davila Duenas, the older brother. "This is too big of a thing for it to stay unpunished."

El Zacaton, hours from the larger cities of Zacatecas and Aguascalientes, straddles the border between the states of San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas. With no heavy industry or manufacturing, nearly all the local residents scratch a living from the sandy fields. Landowners able to afford irrigation can make a decent living from chilies, but those dependant on the whims of desert rainfall have mostly been driven north.

Poverty is on clear display in El Zacaton: A single stand selling bootleg CDs stands in front of a leafy plaza as elderly men sprawl in the shade of crumbling buildings. A Catholic Church, which is being renovated thanks to money sent from the United States, dominates the town's central square. Clutches of teenagers wearing University of Texas caps and Pittsburgh Steelers jackets fly by on bicycles.

The killings have stunned many who regularly migrate north for work. Some say the violent murders have convinced them to stay home; others say that grinding poverty doesn't allow them that luxury.

"For the whole town, this shook us," said Jose Alfredo Lopez, who has migrated several times, mostly to Texas. "Sometimes these young kids think it's so easy, that they'll just go and whatever happens, happens. But this will change their minds."

Sergio Hernandez Vasquez, 22, said killings have convinced him not to return. Hernandez has crossed the border twice, most recently working as a laborer for unidentified businesses in Lebanon, Ohio. "When I heard about it, I was afraid, I thought, 'That could happen to me,'" he said. "There's very little work here, but I'll look, maybe in Aguascalientes or Monterrey."

Rolando Guardado, 31, has been migrating regularly since he was 18. He said crossing the border and living as an undocumented immigrant has gotten increasingly dangerous; gang members and criminals are crossing the border as well, menacing hard-working immigrants.

"You have 15 immigrants living in an apartment and 10 are hard workers and the rest are into bad stuff," he said. "But as bad as it is, you still have to return there to get money to eat."

"Every time you come back (to the U.S.) you say, that is the last time," said Julio Rodriguez Esparza, 39. "But then you end up going back again."

For the two wives left behind by the murders, the future has become a scary prospect. The families of three of the murdered men live side by side in cinder block homes built with money from Ohio. The four children, 12 months to 8 years old, play in the shared dirt yard and a small pen holding six goats.

"They left for a reason, there is no work here," said Martina Lopez Davila, the wife of Lino Guardado and mother of 8-and 5-year-old boys. "Everything he earned he sent to his family."

Rosalia Gonzalez Tenorio, wife of Manuel and mother of a 7- and 1-year-old, said she's not sure how her family will survive. The government of San Luis Potosi has pledged a little over $1,000 for each family, but she says that won't be enough to secure their future. "And the kids, they ask for milk, for shoes, for toys," she said. "What do we do?"

Rosalia says her boys' future likely lies in crossing the border when their time comes, despite the horrible end that their father met in the United States.

"We don't want them to go," she said. "But probably, when they get old enough, they will ask to go."

Contact this reporter at jschwartz@coxnews.com.