A Mexican teenager whose death triggered a public outcry over the nation’s femicide crisis died of asphyxiation, the partial results of a new autopsy showed on Monday, strengthening her family’s belief that she was murdered.
The body of 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar was exhumed on July 1 for new studies to determine the cause of her death.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has promised justice to the parents of the law student, whose body was found in April in a motel water tank, 12 days after she disappeared.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Her death “was due to asphyxiation by suffocation,” said Felipe Takeshi, head of the Institute of Forensic Sciences of the Superior Court of Justice in Mexico City.
The institute is taking part in the probe being conducted by a private investigator hired by Escobar’s family.
Takeshi said Escobar had been dead for three to five days when her body was found, and he ruled out sexual violence.
A previous forensic report commissioned by Escobar’s family concluded that the young woman had been raped and murdered, but “no evidence was found, no type of finding that could support sexual violence,” Takeshi said.
The new autopsy, which was agreed to by federal and state authorities and the family, seeks to “standardize forensic criteria on the cause of death” based on the first official autopsy — performed by the Nuevo Leon State Prosecutor’s Office — and the private expert report her family commissioned.
Prosecutors had previously said the teenager died of a blow to the head and that they were not ruling anything out, including an accident or murder.
After hearing the new findings, Debanhi Escobar’s father, Mario Escobar, said his daughter had clearly been murdered.
“My daughter did not die accidentally, that is my hypothesis,” he told reporters, adding that he is still awaiting the results of other analyses being carried out in England.
“Every process of femicide, because it is a femicide, is long, but I have peace that we are advancing,” he said.
A photograph taken on the night Debanhi Escobar disappeared, which showed her standing in the dark by the roadside after an altercation with a taxi driver, went viral.
She quickly became a symbol for an angry women’s rights movement in a nation where about 10 women are murdered every day.
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