Newly revealed excerpts from a police report filed in the death of a North Carolina woman while on vacation in Mexico have only deepened the mystery, as her family presses on for more answers.
Shanquella Robinson, 25, died on October 29 — just a day after arriving in Mexico — in the living room the villa she and six friends had rented in Cabo San Lucas, as CrimeOnline previously reported. Robinson’s friends reportedly told her family that she died from alcohol poisoning, but an autopsy report said that she died from back and neck injuries.
The autopsy report also said that she died within 15 minutes of incurring the injury, but the police report excerpts, obtained by the Charlotte Observer from a Mexican investigative reporter, says that a doctor was with her in the vacation rental for nearly three hours before she died and doesn’t mention any injuries.
The new information — first published by reporter Gerardo Zuñiga in MetropoliMx on Monday — says that Robinson’s friends called for a doctor at about 2:13 p.m. on October 29. The doctor — Dr. Karolina Beatriz Ornelas Gutiérrez — arrived from the American Medical Center about an hour later.
The report does not say who called for the doctor, but it lists Wenter Donovan, one of the six people identified as accompanying Robinson to Mexico, as the reporting person. According to a translation of the report made by a Spanish-speaking Observer staffer, the doctor said she was told that Robinson had “drunk a lot of alcohol” and that she’d been called to give her an IV.
Gutiérrez said the woman she found, presumably Robinson, had stable vital signs but was dehydrated, could not communicate verbally, and appeared to be intoxicated. She told the friends she believed Robinson needed to go to a hospital, but they refused and insisted that she be treated in the rental. The doctor tried to insert an IV but was unsuccessful — the report does not say what was in the IV.
The doctor had been on the scene for about an hour when Robinson began having a seizure, which lasted for less than a minute. At about 4:20 p.m., the report says, Donovan called for an ambulance
“In the meantime, the patient presented with difficulty breathing and a lowered pulse, and they gave her rescue breaths,” the report says.
The doctor began administering CPR about 30 minutes later when she detected Robinson’s pulse had stopped. Police arrived and spoke with Gutiérrez at 5:25. The report isn’t clear about what time the ambulance arrived but says paramedics administered “14 rounds of CPR, five doses of adrenaline and six discharges (AED shocks) without success.”
Gutiérrez pronounced Robinson dead at 5:57 p.m. The report lists “deceased person (cardiopulmonary arrest)“ as the reason police were called.
The Baja California Sur attorney general’s office said it was investigating Robinson’s death, as is the FBI.
Robinson’s mother, Sallamondra Robinson, has said that each of the six friends has told a different story, and none of them have spoken with reporters. It’s unknown if any have spoken with law enforcement. Several of them, including Wenter Donovan, have disconnected phone numbers.
And if the published circumstances of Robinson’s death weren’t strange enough, a video surfaced last week that appeared to show a nude Robinson being pummeled by another woman, while a person off camera says, “Quella can you at least fight back?”
Sallamondra Robinson said the woman being beaten is her daughter and identified other people in the video as the friends who went with her to Mexico.
Since Shanquella Robinson’s death, Mexican authorities and the FBI have opened investigations. MetropoliMx reported that FBI agents arrived in Cabo over the weekend and said that Mexican authorities are also looking into the actions of officials for possible wrongdoing in their handling of the case.
For the latest true crime and justice news, subscribe to the ‘Crime Stories with Nancy Grace’ podcast.
[Featured image: Shanquella Robinson/Instagram]
