Our dream vacation to Mexico became a nightmare when my kid was drugged
A Canadian mom says she was faced with her worst nightmare on a Mexican getaway where she believes her 22-year-old daughter was mysteriously drugged.
Nearly two months later, Karen Newton is still trying to piece together the events that led up to a terrifying ordeal in which her daughter was found half-naked and slurring her words at a luxury resort in Riviera Maya, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
While vacationing at the BlueBay Grand Esmeralda resort, the 22-year-old reportedly returned to the family’s room from a beach bar clearly disoriented and barely able to walk.
Newton said it was immediately apparent to her that her daughter was drugged. The 22-year-old wasn’t vomiting, but she had little muscle control and couldn’t speak.
Relieved her daughter was back, the mom tucked her in and fell asleep beside her on the bed — only to wake up three hours later to find she had vanished.
Newton started frantically running around the resort shouting her daughter’s name until she encountered a security guard.
The man made a call in Spanish that lasted several minutes — then asked the mom if she understood.
She told him that she did not know much Spanish and the pair returned to looking for her daughter.
But then, she said, a golf cart came up to them and he took off on the vehicle leaving her behind.
“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.”
When she headed back to her room, she found two security guards carrying her daughter, who was half-naked and stumbling, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Behind her, there was an angry man chasing them, she said.
“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 rushed to her daughter’s aid, but when she turned around, the men had disappeared.
She ushered her daughter back into their room where she began repeatedly muttering, “Nine-hundred-fifty dollars,” according to the mom.
“I think she overheard a conversation of some sort, whether somebody had paid for her … I can’t even go there,” Newton told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The next morning, the 22-year-old told her mother that she remembered nothing.
Newton said that she confronted the resort managers, who were reluctant to help.
“They make you feel like you’ve done something wrong,” she said. “They want you to feel like you were drunk and it was your own fault.”
The mom said she felt there were few avenues to report the crime in Mexico and her daughter didn’t want to go to police.
The family doesn’t plan to return to Mexico but wants to warn others of the dangers.
“There’s more to this deeper, darker story than we know,” Newton said.
An official at BlueBay Grand Esmeralda told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that they are looking into the matter.