For the heck of it, I googled "Maria Mendez Morales missing" and found a hit that interested me.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ar...nepage&q=Maria Mendez Morales missing&f=false
It's regarding a book called Mexizona. I started skimming through the book for the yellow highlights (the bits that matched my search result) and started reading around Chapter 3. The book has a girl named Maria Mendez Moralez and a boy named Diego Cruz. They first met in Altar, Mexico, she was passing through, and were urged by the local migrants to buy fake passports and pose as a married couple to get through the border into the US. There's a bit where it mentions her already wearing a ring from her fiance who's waiting back in Georgia. The fiance had worked up enough money to pay coyotes to get her through the desert.
They were posing as man and wife. Donald Rizzo, 19, and Mary Rizzo, 18, from Lincoln, Nebraska. The forger added a year to both of their ages, and they were wearing matching bright red t-shirts with bold, white lettering that said "GO BIG RED". In the book, she was a couple months or so pregnant.
Around Ch 7, a couple of guys began shooting at the coyotes and the group and ended up hitting Maria (to my knowledge, our JD wasn't shot, or pregnant for that matter). The group kept running for cover leaving Maria behind. She was still alive and hit in the leg when Diego did manage to go back to look for her. The guy that shot her was a kid named Arlen, who happened to be the nephew of the Pima County Sheriff.
By Ch 11 she had passed away in the desert, pale and cold. Judging by what I skimmed possibly due to a combination of blood loss and dehydration.
There wasn't much more about the character after that, and I couldn't view the entire book, only the beginning to the first page of Ch 18. The copyright is 2013 by Alan A. Larson. The book can be bought online as an ebook, which I just might do.
Amazon.com: Mexizona: An American Dream eBook: Alan A. Larson: Kindle Store
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mex...am-alan-a-larson/1115247862?ean=2940016785769
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17404081-mexizona---an-american-dream
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I started more towards Ch 1 (they actually didn't go through the gate, they got close, but never made it through and ended up doing it the old fashioned way by sneaking out) and noticed something interesting that I had forgotten all about from the few times I've passed through Nogales. Video cameras. I wonder if LE had ever went through the border's video footage of people coming out of Mexico.
/edit 2
I should probably clarify that this book is supposedly a work of pure fiction. I can't find any details as to whether or not it's based on a true story.