Obscure Occurrences : The Disappearance and Death of Debanhi Escobar

 Mexico is a beautiful country that houses a variety of delicious food, unique cultural experiences and inviting locals. Despite its countless qualities, the country has recently gained a reputation for being extremely dangerous for women as the number of femicides throughout Mexico has skyrocketed to unbelievable levels. Women are being killed at an alarming rate targeted solely for being born a female and a recent case has brought that issue to the forefront of the nation's public consciousness. This case is the mysterious and extremely disturbing disappearance and death of Debanhi Escobar, an 18-year-old law student living in Apodaca. In the early hours of April 9, 2022, Debanhi magically disappeared after a night out with her friends. 

Debanhi's last photo

Disappearance

 On April 8th, 2022, Debanhi went on a night out with two other young women namely, her new friend Sarai whom she'd only known for about four months, and a girl that she had just met that very night named Ivvone. At around 11 pm, the three of them ordered a taxi using a rideshare app and made their way into the center of Monterrey Nuevo Leon. Their driver took them to Simon Bolivar where they stopped at a store and purchased a bottle of vodka before heading to their first party of the night. As seen in the shop surveillance footage, the girls all appeared to be in high spirits and of sober mind at this point in time. At least after checking out a couple of empty events, the girls finally settled on a party at El Diamante in Quinta.

 They booked another taxi and a new driver named Juan David Cuellar dropped them off at about 1:20 am. Their arrival was caught on a CCTV camera outside the establishment. Ivvone took David's Whatsapp details before exiting the vehicle just in case they needed to call him later for a ride home. It's pretty common for these rideshare apps to be unreliable during the early hours so being able to contact a driver directly made a lot of sense.

 The girls joined up with a group of young guys and entered El Diamante together. However, just 10 minutes after arriving, that same outside surveillance camera caught Debanhi leaving the party by herself and heading towards an outside pool area. Four young men passed her and seemingly taken in by her beauty, looked back in her direction. It's not known who these men were and if they shouted anything at her or if they were just talking about her amongst themselves. Debanhi returned to the party at some point around three in the morning and allegedly started behaving very strangely as she began shouting and acting out of character and at one point even locked herself inside the men's bathroom. Upon exiting the bathroom, she scolded Ivvone for leaving her alone at the party and according to Ivvone and other witnesses, continued to make a scene.

 This prompted Ivvone to message David (the taxi driver who had dropped them off) asking him to come and pick up Debanhi and take her home. At 3:45 am the camera outside the building caught a clearly distressed Debanhi fleeing from a male partygoer. After he catches up with her, she seemingly slaps and kicks him. Moments later several other people also appear including Sarai and Ivvone and it's hard to tell for sure what happened there. This large group may have been trying to defuse a situation but, the footage also shows a smaller subgroup of them surrounding Debanhi preventing her from getting away.

 At 3:54 am David arrived at the scene in his white taxi and a video captured at a different angle shows Debanhi quickly entering the vehicle before a man and Ivvone said something to the driver. David and Debanhi then leave El Diamante and head east. At 4:17 am another surveillance camera captured footage of the taxi pulling over at a short distance from the party with Debanhi in the front passenger seat.

 In the video, it appears as if she and David are having an argument or an animated discussion of some kind. After this, the pair continued down the road for a minute or two until they came to the Nuevo Laredo highway. It was there that Debanhi told David to pull over. She then exited the taxi and stood motionless in the middle of the road where he took her final photograph. The road she was standing on is known by locals as the highway of death, due to the terrifyingly high number of women who have disappeared there.  Shortly after this image was captured, like the other women who went missing, Debanhi herself would go missing too.

 At 4:25 am David sent Ivvone this photo of Debanhi standing outside of his taxi. He also sent her texts and voicemails saying that Debanhi had gotten out and that she refused to get back inside. He then sent Ivvone a final picture of Debanhi proving that she was outside the taxi and was no longer his responsibility. He then drove off leaving the young intoxicated Debanhi alone on the road. He continued to stay in contact with Ivvone for about the next 45 minutes explaining that he couldn't have touched or forced Debanhi into the vehicle without facing legal consequences and that it was now her friend's responsibility to go there and get her. About 10 hours later at 2:54 pm, he messaged Ivvone one final time to ask her what happened to her friend. Ivvone replied three hours later and simply said that they haven't found her.  

 Debanhi never made it home that night and after David left, nobody ever heard from her again. A CCTV camera caught her moving in the direction of Escobedo, away from the party at El Diamante, walking erratically down the busy highway. In the footage, she crosses a transportation company called Alcosa and shortly thereafter, is seen strangely running into the Nueva Castilla motel and looking in through the windows of its closed-down restaurant. Seemingly, trying to gain access to the building or see if somebody's inside.

 After leaving the indoor cameras field of view, she apparently hid in the corner of the motel's garden for 20 minutes before she was finally seen walking along the wall. With nobody else appearing in the footage, Debanhi simply disappeared.

Discovery

 On the morning of April 9^th, Debanhi's parents Mario and Dolores Escobar reported their daughter missing. To begin with David, her taxi driver and the last person to see her was suspect number one. Mario Escobar was convinced that he was the one behind his daughter's disappearance and asserted that, in one of the footage, David was trying to inappropriately grab Debanhi which made her get out of the vehicle.

 This accusation had an immediate effect on David's reputation and relationships which in turn, forced him to publicly deny his involvement in Debanhi's disappearance. On national television, he explained that in the foretold piece of footage, he was actually struggling to deal with Debanhi who was either drunk or high on drugs or both. He said that she was being aggressive with him slapping him and was totally incoherent. In line with David, he was trying to ask Debanhi for her home address or her mother's phone number but, the girl was drunk and angry and refused to give either to him. Unable to calm her down, a frustrated David messaged Ivvone that he was struggling and didn't want any problems.

 Ivvone was unable to give David Debanhi's address or her mother's number since they had only just met that night. But, she did make it very clear in her replies that Debanhi shouldn't come back to the party. In Ivvone’s words, Debanhi acting uncontrollably was why she and the other party members chased her down and surrounded her. However, she did say that Debanhi had only been drinking vodka and hadn't taken any substances at least not knowingly.

 For 12 long days, Debanhi’s whereabouts remained unknown during which, investigators and local volunteers searched extensively for the missing young woman. On April 21^st, a group of officers approached the Nueva Castilla motel whose roadside entrance read “Don't take risks stay with us” as the staff there had complained about a foul-smelling odor coming from the out-of-service restaurant. The authorities were summoned to check it out, given that the motel was the place of Debanhi's last-known movements.

 The grounds were already searched several times with drones and sniffer dogs however, nobody had bothered to check the restaurant's underground water tank. This area was inaccessible to the public and was surrounded by a 2.6-meter-high concrete wall and barbed wire. This tank was about 30 feet away from where Debanhi was last caught on camera and in the same direction she was walking. After peaking into one of the two open systems, everyone's worst nightmare became a reality as fourteen feet underground was Debanhi's lifeless body lying face down in three feet of water.

 That same cistern had her removed converse shoes and a tissue that contained the quote “Cadaveric matter” with signs of insect activity. Given that she'd been left for nearly two weeks in a hot damp tank, her remains were unrecognizable and she had to initially be identified by her clothing and necklace.

Investigation 

 To begin with, the attorney general's office tried to claim that Debanhi had accidentally fallen inside the tank and drowned after banging her head. This hypothesis was rejected by her family. A second much more detailed independent report revealed that she had actually been repeatedly hit in the head by a blunt mechanical object at various angles. There was severe damage to both sides of the frontal region of her skull, above her right ear, on both of her eyelids, on her nose, on her lips, and on the right retro auricular region. According to the manner of death described by the report, craniofacial contusions are of external origin to the body and as they are intense, repeated, and with different angles of impact, they were caused by another person and it was a violent homicidal death. The report said that since there was no water inside her lungs, she must have already been dead by the time that she had been dumped in the tank. This second report also found that Debanhi had been raped and concluded that it was not an accident but a murder.

 Some of her personal things including her keys, a small bag, a phone case, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and her lighter were found inside the other open cistern next to the one her remains were found inside. Either she had thrown them in there for some unknown reason or somebody else had hidden them. Interestingly, more items were also found inside the middle section which connected the two systems. These included a dirt-covered white bra, Debanhi's face mask, her black purse, and two pieces of beige fabric.

 As it would turn out, the Attorney General's office had intentionally been withholding information about Debanhi's case and had made at least two errors in their initial finding. That wasn't surprising given the amount of apathy and negligence the Mexican authorities have shown to countless other cases like Debanhi’s where they've often publicly tried to shame the victim to cover the case with a rug but a question of a more disturbing motivation still lingers. As corruption has plagued many parts of the world and Mexico has more than its fair share of corrupt cops, could they have been covering something up in Debanhi's case?

 With not much evidence, what we can speculate is what actually happened to Debanhi that fateful night but for us to have a more informed opinion several questions still need answering. “What exactly happened at the party to make  Debanhi act so  erratically?”, “Did she have more in her system than just vodka?”, “Why did she hide for 20 minutes outside the out-of-service motel restaurant?”, “How did she gain access to the area with the systems which was  protected by a high wall and barbed wire?”, “Were the cameras tampered with or the footage edited in some way?”, “How did her personal items end up in the small tunnel that connected both of the systems?”, and “Why did the authorities release incorrect details about her case even before her remains were discovered” are some of the many mysterious unanswered questions.