Aspiring Mexican singer and music producer Maria Mathus Tenorio, 25, decided to go on a solo adventure around the world to share her music. Sadly, the first country she set foot in was also the last.
Online image
The first destination on her itinerary was Costa Rica, where, unfortunately, her body was found face down on the beach of El Carmen, in the popular surf resort of Santa Teresa del Cobano, just a week after she had started her journey, said the Ministry of Public Security of Costa Rica.
Click to Gallery
Aspiring Mexican singer and music producer Maria Mathus Tenorio, 25, decided to go on a solo adventure around the world to share her music. Sadly, the first country she set foot in was also the last.
The first destination on her itinerary was Costa Rica, where, unfortunately, her body was found face down on the beach of El Carmen, in the popular surf resort of Santa Teresa del Cobano, just a week after she had started her journey, said the Ministry of Public Security of Costa Rica.
According to the police, Maria was with a British woman she had met while travelling when they were assaulted by two men who tried to rob them.
The British woman managed to escape and inform a security guard, asking for help. However, Mathus Tenorio was cornered and her attacker reportedly assaulted, raped, and then drowned Maria in the sea.
Official sources report that two suspects have been arrested for the crime, identified as Esquivel Cerdas, who is suspected of attacking the Mexican woman and Benavides Mendoza, who is accused of rape.
Maria posted a photo on Instagram before starting the trip with the message: "Today my trip starts after a long time wish to travel all around the planet alone.
Online image
According to the police, Maria was with a British woman she had met while travelling when they were assaulted by two men who tried to rob them.
Online image
The British woman managed to escape and inform a security guard, asking for help. However, Mathus Tenorio was cornered and her attacker reportedly assaulted, raped, and then drowned Maria in the sea.
Online image
Official sources report that two suspects have been arrested for the crime, identified as Esquivel Cerdas, who is suspected of attacking the Mexican woman and Benavides Mendoza, who is accused of rape.
Online image
Maria posted a photo on Instagram before starting the trip with the message: "Today my trip starts after a long time wish to travel all around the planet alone.
“The time has arrived to be full of nature. Costa Rica, pure life".
Online image
After the incident, hundreds of people, locals and foreigners participated in the “Marcha de Blanco” (Protest in White), in Santa Teresa, Cobano, Puntarenas, an event organized to pay tribute to María Trinidad Matus, which also had the purpose of raising awareness to battle insecurity and stop violence against women.
SEATTLE (AP) — Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a suburban Seattle police officer charged with murder in the death of a 26-year-old man outside a convenience store in 2019 — the third person the officer had killed in the past eight years.
Auburn officer Jeff Nelson shot and killed Jesse Sarey while trying to arrest him for disorderly conduct in an interaction that lasted just 67 seconds, authorities said. Sarey had reportedly been throwing things at cars.
Citing surveillance video from nearby businesses, prosecutors said Nelson wrestled with Sarey, repeatedly punched him in the head and shot him twice. As Sarey was wounded and reclined on the ground from the first shot, which struck his upper abdomen, Nelson cleared a jammed round out of his gun, glanced at a nearby witness, turned back to Sarey and shot him again — this time in the forehead, prosecutors said.
The case is the second to go to trial since Washington voters in 2018 made it easier to charge police by removing a standard that required prosecutors to prove they acted with malice; now, prosecutors must show that the level of force was unreasonable or unnecessary. In December, jurors acquitted three Tacoma police officers in the 2020 death of Manuel Ellis.
Nelson later said in a written statement that he believed Sarey had a knife and posed a threat before the first shot — and that Sarey was on his knees in a “squatting fashion … ready to spring forward” before the officer fired again. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder and first-degree assault.
An Iraq war veteran, Nelson joined the department in 2008.
The city of Auburn paid Sarey’s family $4 million to settle a civil rights claim and has paid nearly $2 million more to settle other litigation over Nelson’s actions as a police officer.
The trial, before King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, is expected to last several weeks. Gaines has ruled that jurors will not hear evidence about Nelson’s prior uses of deadly force or about Sarey’s history of drug use.
In one of those earlier cases, the city of Auburn agreed to pay $1.25 million to the family of a different man killed by Nelson, Isaiah Obet.
Obet had been reportedly breaking into houses and attempting to carry out a carjacking with a knife when Nelson confronted him in 2017. Nelson released his police dog, which bit Obet, and then shot the man in the torso. Obet, on the ground and still fighting off the police dog, started to try to get back up, and Nelson shot him again, in the head, police said.
Lawyers for Obet’s family said he posed no threat to anyone when he was shot. The Auburn Police Department disagreed.
“If Officer Nelson had not acted that day to protect the community, there could have been additional victims,” then-Police Chief Dan O’Neil said in a Facebook post after the family sued.
Nelson also shot and killed Brian Scaman, a Vietnam veteran with mental issues and a history of felonies, in 2011 after pulling Scaman over for a burned-out headlight. Scaman got out of his car with a knife and refused to drop it; Nelson shot him in the head. An inquest jury cleared Nelson of any wrongdoing.
In another case, Nelson used his patrol car in 2018 to strike Joseph Loren Allen, a man suspected of being a felon in possession of a firearm who was running away from police. At the time Nelson struck him, pinning him against a fence and breaking both his ankles, Allen was neither armed nor posing a threat to anyone, Allen's lawyer argued.
The lawyer, Mohammad Hamoudi, compiled a summary of Nelson's uses of force and filed it in federal court. It noted about three dozen times between 2012 and 2018 when Nelson sent his police dog after suspects and about a dozen times when he used neck restraint holds to render suspects unconscious.
The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, which oversees the certification of police in the state, has moved to discipline and possibly revoke Nelson’s badge, saying he has shown a pattern of “an intentional or reckless disregard for the rights of others.”
FILE - Auburn police officer Jeff Nelson appears in King County Superior Court, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kent, Wash. Jury selection began Monday, April 22, 2024, in the trial of the suburban Seattle police officer charged with murder in the death of a 26-year-old man outside a convenience store in 2019. (Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times via AP, File)
