Armando Montaño, a former intern for the Colorado Independent, died this past weekend in Mexico City, where he was writing for the Associated Press. Mexican officials are investigating his death and, according to the AP, the U.S. embassy is monitoring that investigation.

Mando, as his friends called him, died in a building near his apartment in the city’s trendy Condessa neighborhood, his body reportedly found Saturday at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Mando had been living in the Mexican capital for only roughly a month at the time of his death, but a story on an airport police shootout he posted a week ago touched on the widespread corruption of officials routinely tapped to help move the cash and merchandise of the drug trade.

“Two federal police officers suspected ofworking for drug traffickers opened fire on fellow officers in a crowded food court Monday, killing three policemen as panicked witnesses dove for cover,” he wrote in the story dated June 26.

The slain agents were members of a team investigating a cocaine trafficking ring. The team had seized more than 600 pounds of cocaine at Mexico City’s international airport, where the firefight Mando reported took place last Monday.

The AP said Mando was “not on assignment at the time of his death.”

The stint in Mexico City was just the latest stop for Mando on a learning tour at some of the top journalism outlets in the country.

He interned for the New York Times Caucus blog last December from Iowa, where he was a student at Grinnell College. He had