Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Family mourns murdered diver
A former Marine who recently lived in Palm Beach County while learning to scuba dive had planned to return to his hometown of Atlanta on Thursday, according to relatives.
But 36-year-old Drew DeVoursney never made it home. He and his Canadian girlfriend Francesca Matus, 52, were found slain in Belize this week, authorities said.
A big man with a big heart, “he was very adventurous, very brave, and he was always wanting to be out in nature and not stuck inside,” DeVoursney’s mother, Char DeVoursney, of Atlanta, told the Sun Sentinel.
Few details have been released by police about the murder investigation. The couple reportedly were last seen leaving a bar in the northern Corozal District on April 25, days before their bodies were found Monday.
Authorities in Belize on Sunday found Matus’ white Isuzu Rodeo abandoned about 10 miles from the bar. And the next day, the couple’s bodies were found in a sugar-cane field with duct tape wrapped around their right wrists, according to Char DeVoursney.
She said she learned of her son’s death from U.S. Embassy officials in Belize. The bodies were so decomposed they had to be cremated, she said.
Drew DeVoursney lived with his best friend, Brandon Barfield, in Palm Beach County last year while going to school in West Palm Beach for a scuba diving certification, she said.
In December, he moved to Belize to start his own diving company, on property he and Barfield had purchased about four years earlier, she said.
But it wasn’t working out the way he’d expected, she said. He planned to move back home and pursue a new career, which she said was something he had done a few times before.
“That’s how he was in life,” she said. “He was not controlled by opinions and what people wanted him to do. He was determined to do whatever he wanted to do and he didn’t think anything could hold him back.”
DeVoursney served in the Marines, prompted to serve after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she said. “He was always very brave and strong, and committed about life,” she said.
DeVoursney served two tours, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, she said. Afterward, he remained in Afghanistan for a few years to teach Marines how to use certain technological equipment out in the field, she said. While with the company, he traveled to Japan, Germany and across the U.S. The 6-foot-6 athlete overcame posttraumatic stress disorder when he returned home, she said.
Char and David DeVoursney are settling with the fact that he’s really gone, she said.
“I’m getting better today as far as mentally, emotionally, and I’m not feeling so numb and incomplete,” she said. “But it feels like being in a whirlwind of craziness.”
Corozal District police, reached multiple times by the Sun Sentinel, have declined to provide any details about the case.
Drew DeVoursney’s younger brother had spoken to his brother every day for the past month as they planned for DeVoursney’s trip home to Atlanta, she said. David DeVoursney last heard from his brother five hours before he and Matus were last seen, she said.
David DeVoursney and Barfield on Tuesday traveled to Belize to retrieve his brother’s ashes, she said. The family plans to have a memorial service in Nashville, Tenn., and bury Drew DeVoursney’s ashes in the Nashville National Cemetery, his mother said.