Six people killed.  Forty-three people missing. Twenty-five students wounded. Twenty-two police officers arrested. Mayor José Luis Abarca on the run.

This was the outcome of the recent Mexican shooting near the town of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014. As the students from Raúl Isidro Burgos Ayotzinapa Normal School were returning to Ayotzinapa after seeking funds for materials for their teachers college, the shooting broke out.

“The buses stopped, and that’s when I saw the bullets were coming toward us,” said a first-year student at the Ayotzinapa Normal School to VICE News. “We saw that there were 10 police cars surrounding us. We had nowhere to run and no rocks to defend ourselves (with).”

In an attempt to survive the attack, many of the students fled the location only to be shot down or never seen again. Authorities suspect that the students were either kidnapped and delivered to the drug cartel Guerreros Unido or massacred.

“We thought that they were going to kill all of us,” said survivor of the attack and student at the Ayotzinapa Normal School David Flores, to VICE News. “They were hunting us.”

President Enrique Peña Nieto ordered a search in an attempt to find the 43 missing students. Over five mass graves were discovered on the outskirts of the town, yet none of the bodies belonged to the missing students.

The alleged mastermind behind the shooting is Mayor José Luis Abarca. After the abduction and shooting of the students, Abarca fled.

“The Mexican drug cartels are ruthless, and it is a shame that a lot of the politicians and law enforcement officers have been corrupted by the money they can offer,” said Assistant Professor of Political Science Robert Duncan. “The Mexican people need to rise up against this degree of violence; however, they are so outgunned in comparison that I do not see any type of solution for this kind of vehemence anytime soon.”

Almost a month after the event, officials revealed that Abarca had close ties with the Guerreros Unidos, and that he regularly received a hefty sum from the cartel for supporting their selling of opium paste.

“Mexico has a long tradition of drug cartels linked to local government and local politicians,” said Professor of Political Science Xuezhi Guo. “The government pays the leaders significantly less in comparison to the drug cartels, which may pay up to 10 times as more. So, in order to succeed, local officials may accept the money. This type of corruption can be expected in Mexican politics.”

Speculation by Mexican officials and locals suggests that Abarca may have ordered the shooting of the students over fear that their protests and demonstrations would disrupt his profits.

“The mayor of the town, José Luis Abarca, staged this “mass disappearance” (most probably murder) of these protesting students to cover up his own practices of downright nepotism and underworld connections within his town,” said Pratham Chhabria, a junior Early College student who has been following the event closely. “Abarca recognized the students were unhappy with his ‘drug mafia lord’ sort of business in the town and had them disappear so they could not reveal his practices to the world in the rally they were going to attend.”

Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Abarca, his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa and police chief Felipe Flores.