TEUCHITLAN, Mexico — When a group of citizens searching for missing relatives in the western state of Jalisco arrived at a remote ranch outside Mexico’s second-largest city last week on an anonymous tip, all they had to do was push open the unlocked gate.

Inside they went to work with simple tools — picks, shovels and metal bars — doing the work that state investigators supposedly had done some six months earlier.

What they found embarrassed state authorities and shook Mexico: dozens of shoes, heaps of clothing and what appeared to be human bone fragments.

Distraught families from across the country have already started reaching out about clothing items they say they recognize.

It was a shocking reminder of Mexico’s more than 120,000 disappeared and enough to push the federal government to take over the troubled investigation.

The ranch in Teuchitlan, about 37 miles west of Guadalajara was allegedly being used as a training base for cartel recruits when National Guard troops found it last September.

— The Associated Press