"It was a friend’s fight on the street," Edgar Chairez said, describing the moment more than a decade ago when gunmen opened fire in Mexicali and left him in a hospital bed. Chairez told MMA Fighting he tried to break up the scrap, that his friend was shot four times, that he was hit once — and that he survived by running away while the shooters kept firing until they ran out of bullets.
The detail matters this week because Chairez brings that history — and a three-win, two-loss UFC ledger with one no‑contest — into a high-stakes pairing Saturday at UFC Vegas 118 against Bruno Silva. Chairez has won his past two fights, over CJ Vergara and Felipe Bunes, and made his octagon debut in 2023; Silva enters as the betting favorite at -125 while Chairez is listed at +105 and sits outside Silva’s No. 15 spot in the UFC rankings.
Chairez’s numbers are straightforward: he said his friend was struck four times and he took a single bullet. The photograph he posted from a hospital bed earlier this year, he said, is part of a life he has learned to tell plainly — the violence around him in Mexicali, the narrowness of survival, and the odd handful of choices that put him on the path to mixed martial arts instead of professional soccer.
He recalled a childhood in which violence was a constant presence but insisted he was never a gang member and did not hang out with gangs. "My dream was to be a professional footballer," Chairez said; he played football until he was 18 before turning his life toward fighting. Those details frame why a street shooting more than a decade ago still feels proximate to the man who will step into the cage this weekend.
The account contains a stubborn contradiction. Chairez said, plainly, "But I remember they fired a lot of shots at me. But the good thing was, they were such idiots, they had terrible aim. They only hit me once." He stressed both that the attackers kept firing until they ran out of bullets and that their aim was so poor he escaped with a single wound — an odd pair of facts that underscore how much of the episode remains raw memory rather than a neat, verifiable record.
That ambiguity extends to the public record: Chairez has described what happened and shown the hospital photo, but the exact timing and fuller circumstances of the attack — how the fight began, who the shooters were, and why they targeted the group that night — were not detailed in his interview. It is a gap that sharpens the story even as he uses it to explain how survival shaped him as a fighter and a man.
Bruno Silva, listed by BetMGM as the No. 15-ranked flyweight contender, arrives in Las Vegas with two wins in his last five bouts and recent victories over Cody Durden and HyunSung Park; his recent losses include Manel Kape, Joshua Van and Charles Johnson, per BetMGM. Chairez’s UFC setbacks came against Joshua Van and Tatsuro Taira, but his consecutive wins over Vergara and Bunes have pushed him back toward respectability and given him momentum going into Saturday.
What happens next is literal and immediate: Chairez will attempt to translate survival into offense inside the UFC cage on Saturday at UFC Vegas 118. He has told part of the story of how he survived being shot in Mexico; what he has not yet done is fix the who, when and why of that night. If he wins in Las Vegas, the victory will carry a different weight — not just another notch on a 3–2 record, but a public milepost in a life that nearly ended on a street in Mexicali more than a decade ago.
