https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...l2u?li=BBnb7Kz

To the hundreds of students who lined up outside the funeral home that April evening in 2010, Brian Betts had been a beloved Washington middle school principal. A second father. An inspiration.

“R.I.P. Mr. Betts,” said their shirts and hoodies.

“Mr. Betts, We Love You,” read their signs.

But to O’Neil McGean, who stood in the Pierce Funeral Home parking lot in Manassas, Va., gripping a friend’s hand and fighting back tears, Brian had been so much more.

He had been the love of O’Neil’s life.

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They had met at a stoplight, O’Neil’s personality so boisterous it took him only a few seconds to make a lasting impression. Soon they bought a house together in Shaw, fixing it up in the evenings. They were inseparable for almost a decade. And even after their breakup, after O’Neil moved to Mexico and Brian moved to Maryland, they remained good friends.

Then came the gunshots late one night inside Brian’s bedroom in Silver Spring, and the phone ringing 2,000 miles away in Mazatlan.

[Successful, beloved D.C. principal found fatally shot]

A week later, O’Neil stood in front of his ex’s casket wondering what had gone wrong.

“Why did this happen, Brian?” O’Neil asked aloud.

The answer came two weeks later when police arrested four men, one of whom had arranged to meet Brian via a telephone chat line only to rob him, shoot him and leave him to die.

The crime chastened O’Neil. He was already careful about living in Mexico. Now he grew wary of online dating.

But by Oct. 25, 2016, that caution had waned. After agreeing to meet someone through a dating app, O’Neil disappeared — as did $16,000 from his bank accounts.

The question this time was less why than how.

How could O’Neil fall prey to the same trap that had claimed Brian six years prior?

How could the 53-year-old not see it coming?
‘Hope he is ok’

The first messages weren’t alarming.

“Hola amigo, you there,” Jorge Guillen Gonzalez wrote on Facebook messenger on Oct. 26, 2016.

“Si, yo estoy aqui,” replied Donnie McGean, O’Neil’s oldest brother. “All is good, and you?”

“Not as good [as] I want.”

They had met six months earlier when Donnie and his wife visited O’Neil in Mazatlan, a city known as the Pearl of the Pacific.

O’Neil had moved there in 2006 after visiting a few times. The same charisma that had made him the center of attention as a kid in Chevy Chase — leading his little brother Chris and their friends through Rock Creek Park, refereeing fights after school at Blessed Sacrament, captaining dodgeball games — made him popular in the gay-friendly resort town.

It was in Mazatlan that O’Neil met Jorge, a handsome young Mexican with dark hair, green eyes and a tattoo across his tightly muscled chest reading “Warrior of God.” They had dated for a short time before opening a cafe together in 2014.

Now Jorge said he was worried.

O’Neil had gone on a date the night before with someone he’d met on a gay dating app, Jorge said, and O’Neil wasn’t home yet, nor was he answering his phone. His two cherished dogs — Brandy and Guinness, named after O’Neil’s favorite drinks — hadn’t been fed.

Drug violence in the surrounding state of Sinaloa had crept into Mazatlan. So when Jorge said he was receiving strange Spanglish texts from O’Neil’s phone, Donnie told him to call the police.

“[I] really miss O’Neil. He is my life. He knows how much I love him. Hope he is ok, wherever he is,” Jorge wrote in broken English.

“My heart is broken,” he said later. “I just wanna die.”

“Hang in there. I will be there tomorrow,” Donnie wrote as he prepared to board a flight from his home in Maui to Mazatlan. “Our family is very grateful to have you as a friend of O’Neil. Without you we would be nowhere right now.”

‘You don’t give the orders’

Twenty hours later, Donnie, an energetic 62-year-old who founded a trio of natural food groceries, stepped off a plane and headed to meet Jorge at the Hotel Punta Pacifico, a remote resort north of the city. It was here, Jorge said, that O’Neil had gone to meet his date the night he disappeared.

[She thought she’d saved her daughter from MS-13 by smuggling her to the U.S. She was wrong.]

But hotel employees denied seeing O’Neil, and drone footage of the surrounding countryside showed no trace of him or his car.

The sun dipped over the ocean as Jorge drove them south to Mazatlan. They were eating seafood at a restaurant on the malec

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