Mexico Authorities Investigating Homicide Of American Tourist

Mexican prosecutors said Thursday they have opened an investigation into the death of a U.S. woman seen being beaten in a video that has gone viral. Prosecutors in the state of Baja California Sur said in a statement they are investigating the death of a woman they identified only as a foreigner, at a resort development in the town of San Jose del Cabo.

A state official who was not authorized to be quoted by name confirmed the victim was Shanquella Robinson. The official confirmed that the group she had been traveling with had since left Mexico.

A video apparently taped at a luxury villa in San Jose del Cabo shows one woman, apparently an American, beating another woman.

The video has been reposted many times on social media sites. In it, a man with an American accent can be heard saying "Can you at least fight back?" The man did not appear to intervene in the beating.

Prosecutors said police found Robinson dead at the villa on Oct. 29.

Shanquella's mother, Salamondra Robinson, told CBS News' Anne-Marie Green and Dana Jacobson that investigators in Mexico were looking into her daughter's death as a murder. 

"I was glad to hear that," she said. 

Salamondra said she was initially told by Shanquella's friends that she had gotten sick with alcohol poisoning. But later on, she learned there was a fight, and an autopsy found she had injuries to her spinal cord and neck.

The autopsy showed that "her death had nothing to do with alcohol," Salamondra said.

Mexican officials said they could not confirm the cause of death because it was part of an ongoing investigation.

When Salamondra saw the video, she said she knew it was her daughter. It raised questions about why nobody intervened in the purported beating, or why people she was traveling with would have beaten her.

"She was not fighting nobody back. She didn't even have a chance," Salamondra said. "No one tried to stop it."

The group Shanquella was traveling with were people she went to college with, Salamondra said.

"One of the guys supposedly was her best friend," she said. "And he had went on family trips with us, you know? And he had been to the family house."

Salamondra said she hadn't seen him since she got the autopsy results.

The mother hopes she can get more answers about what happened to her daughter, whom she described as having "a heart of gold."

"She loved everybody. She didn't mistreat nobody. Never. No one could possibly ever say anything bad about her because she was a good person," she said.

In another case in a different part of Baja California Sur, prosecutors said they had arrested three men and one woman in the Oct. 25 disappearance of another American, identified as Rodney Davis, 73.

Davis was last seen near El Juncalito beach in the township of Loreto, well to the north of San Jose del Cabo.

The three suspects face kidnapping charges. Davis's body was found two days later on a nearby highway.

First published on November 18, 2022 / 6:15 AM

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