This real photo postcard is number two in Walter H. Horne's documented "triple execution" series, recording the firing-squad execution of three condemned prisoners accused of stealing military supplies. The condemned, Francisco Rojas, Juan Aguilar, and Jose Moreno, were executed on January 15, 1916, at the Northwest Railroad Station in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Horne was an American entrepreneur who arrived in El Paso in 1910 and, recognizing the financial potential of the photographic postcard, opened a studio and began covering the revolution in northern Mexico.

The image captures a condemned man standing upright before an adobe wall beside a fallen body already on the ground, gunsmoke still visible in the air at the moment of discharge. Three riflemen in wide-brimmed hats and bandoliers fire from the right foreground, their weapons leveled, while a fourth figure stands aside with what appears to be a sword or cane. A crowd of men, women, and children is lined up near a second adobe building in the background, looking on. A fallen hat rests in the dirt at the condemned man's feet.

By 1916, Horne was paying Mexican military members for the right to photograph executions, and this series stands among the most arresting products of that arrangement. When Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, Horne was the first photographer on the scene, cementing his reputation as the premier photographic chronicler of the Mexican Revolution along the border.

Printed caption in white script reads "Triple Execution in Mexico. / #2" with "W.H. Horne Co. / (Copyrighted) / El Paso, Texas" in the lower left. Reverse is a standard undivided correspondence-and-address format with "POST CARD" printed at top, unused, with no handwritten inscriptions.