Death of North Carolina woman vacationing in Mexico under investigation

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Prosecutors in Mexico said Thursday that they have begun an investigation after a North Carolina woman was seen beaten in a video at a resort city last month.

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The parents of Shanquella Robinson, 25, of Charlotte, said their daughter was found dead in a hotel room while vacationing with friends in San Jose del Cabo last month, WSOC-TV reported.

The hairdresser traveled to Mexico on Oct. 28 as part of a group of seven friends to celebrate a birthday. They stayed at Villa Linda 32, a rental offered by CaboVillas.com, according to the television station.

Robinson was found dead at a villa in the resort city the next day, according to The Associated Press.

“It’s like a nightmare. I can’t even sleep. I am just frustrated. My heart is just aching as a father. A praying man,” Bernard Robinson, Shanquella Robinson’s father, told WSOC. “I just want some truth because this doesn’t add up right.”

“She was a good child and had a great heart,” Sallamondra Robinson, the woman’s mother, told the television station. “And she did not deserve to be treated like that.”

The state attorney general’s office of Baja California Sur told WSOC that it will “maintain the lines of investigations to collect more evidence to achieve the accurate clarification of the events, without ruling out any hypothesis.”

Rolling Stone attempted to contact Shanquella Robinson’s friends for comment, but none of them immediately responded.

According to the magazine, Shanquella Robinson’s friends told Sallamondra that her daughter’s cause of death was alcohol poisoning.

WSOC, which obtained Shanquella Robinson’s death certificate, said the cause of death was listed as “severe spinal cord injury and atlas luxation.” The certificate also said she died within 15 minutes of injury. Alcohol poisoning was never mentioned as a direct or indirect cause of death.

According to Rolling Stone, the video that purportedly showed Shanquella Robinson in a fight was first published by a North Carolina blogger.

While a woman was being punched, someone out of the frame in the video tells “Quella” to fight back, the magazine reported.

The video raised questions about why none of Robinson’s friends intervened, or why the people she was traveling with might have beaten her, the AP reported.

“It was never a fight. She didn’t fight,” Sallamondra Robinson told WSOC. “They attacked her.”

When reached for comment, a spokesperson from the U.S State Department confirmed a citizen had died in Cabo but had no further comment, according to the AP.

“By the grace of God, I think I am going to get to the bottom of this,” Bernard Robinson told WSOC. “God ain’t gonna fail. It’s going to come out.

“I’m not giving up. I am very confident that I am going to have peace of mind.”

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