‘There’s more to this deeper, darker story than we know’
MILWAUKEE – She didn’t walk out. That much Karen Newton knows about the night her 22-year-old daughter went missing from their room at a luxury resort in Mexico’s alluring Riviera Maya. She couldn’t walk. She could barely stand. It was 1:30 a.m. when her daughter had come back to the room from the beach bar — escorted by a friend — and it was clear to Newton her daughter had been drugged.
She had no muscle control and couldn’t speak, couldn’t even hold her head up. Worried but thankful she was safe in the room, Newton tucked her in and lay beside her, keeping watch. After a couple of hours, Newton drifted to sleep.
Something woke her around 4:30 a.m. She sat up.
Her daughter was gone.
It was a few days after Christmas — more than six months since the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, began reporting on alcohol-related tragedies involving American and Canadian tourists vacationing in Mexico.
The Journal Sentinel identified an additional 10 people who reported
terrifying — in some cases near-death — experiences in Mexico over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Like the more than 140 previously reported incidents, the newest ones include vacationers who blacked out after consuming a few drinks — sometimes just one. They regained consciousness hours later, many of them to learn they had been robbed, sexually assaulted, bruised, bloodied or otherwise injured.
“It has to stop,” said Newton of Peterborough, Ontario. “Somebody has got to stop this.”
When she realized her daughter was missing, Newton raced through the BlueBay Grand Esmeralda resort, shouting her daughter’s name. No sign of her. She ran into a security guard who asked if he could help.
They hurried back to his security desk and he made a call, speaking to somebody — Newton doesn’t know who — for several minutes in Spanish. When he hung up, he turned to Newton and asked if she understood Spanish.
Not much, she said. She had not understood anything he had said on the phone.
He told her to come with him. As they walked along the path, a golf cart came speeding up behind them. It slowed in front of them but didn’t stop. The security guard began running behind it, then jumped on the back.
“It speeds up and takes off and leaves me standing there, in the dark, by myself at 4:30 in the morning,” Newton said. “No word of explanation.”
Newton sprinted back toward her room. At the far end of the hallway, she saw her daughter. She was stumbling, being dragged by two security guards, one on each arm. She was half-clothed. An angry man chased them.
“He was irritated that they were taking her,” Newton said. “When I saw her, she only had on her skimpy little underwear, bare feet, a towel wrapped around (the top of ) her, coming down the hallway and this guy looking, peering over top of her like ‘Who’s taking my girl!’ ”
Newton wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled her toward their room.
As she turned back to question the men, they had all vanished, except the security guard who had left her stand- ing in the dark. “No English,” he told her. “I don’t speak English.”
Hard proof of any crime — drugging, kidnapping, sexual assault — is nearly impossible for tourists in Mexico to obtain. The Journal Sentinel investigation found that resorts are reluctant to call law enforcement or an ambulance and often tell guests to take a taxi to the police station or hospital if they want help. In the case of a young woman from Illinois who said she was raped at a resort in June, police refused to question bartenders or anybody who was in the area.
Medical testing at the hospitals is not consistent, the Journal Sentinel found. Health care workers didn’t test for many of the common so-called date-rape drugs and frequently said the patients were simply drunk. In one case, they diagnosed an Iowa woman who said she had one drink and a few sips of her second drink as being extremely intoxicated. In the same medical records, examined by the Journal Sentinel, results of her blood alcohol test show her level was .02% — well below any scientific definition of intoxication.
When Newton’s daughter woke up in the morning, she had no memory of anything that happened. Her knees were scraped and bruised. She said she didn’t think she was raped, but she wasn’t certain.
When Newton went to the resort’s managers and asked them to call police, they refused, she said.
“It just blows my mind that they can get away with it,” Newton said. “I love Mexico, but not anymore.
“There’s more to this deeper, darker story than we know.”
Among the 150 incidents identified by the Journal Sentinel, some said they were targeted and awoke to find they were victims of crimes. Others found no motive for what happened. They got violently ill but were not robbed or assaulted. Some who were sick were encouraged by resort officials to go to a hospital, where they paid thousands — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars — for care.
The tourism ministry in Mexico insists there is no evidence of tainted alcohol at resorts. The ministry launched a public relations blitz in October to allay fears and assure Americans — the biggest contributors to the nation’s $20 billion a year tourism industry — that it’s safe to visit.