[3] According to PRTC deserters, morale in the group sagged as the insurgents traveled from Nicaragua, across the Río Coco to Honduras, and began a brutal four-day march to the top of the barren Olancho mountain range above the river.
They ran low on supplies, and as described by the PRTC insurgent commander, Dr. José María Reyes Mata, in his diary..."to celebrate the victory of the march, we ate the last of our rations".
U.S embassy documents, citing interviews with PRTC deserters suggest that, as the Honduran military closed in on the group, the 60 plus year old Carney grew physically weak, barely being able to walk even a hundred meters before having to rest.
This official version based on interviews with insurgent survivors, is contradicted in news reports echoed from testimony of a man characterized in media as an exiled former intelligence officer Florencio Cabadero who claimed that Carney was captured, tortured, and then thrown to his death from a helicopter by members of the Honduran Army's elite Battalion 316.
In his book Inside Delta Force, Haney claims credit for killing former Green Beret David Arturo Baez in the final firefight that saw Carney captured (The Battle of Yolo Valley, Honduras).
[4] However, unnamed sources [citation needed] claiming to be linked to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras have purportedly offered that Carney, along with Baez, a Nicaraguan-American Sandinista serving as a military adviser to the guerrilla column, were captured.
According to these same unsourced reports, the bodies of the two Americans were, along with those others killed, flown back over the border on a Honduran military helicopter into Nicaragua and unceremoniously dumped into the triple canopy jungle below.