The mother of Shanquella Robinson, a North Carolina woman who died during a Mexican getaway with a group of friends in late October, has revealed new information about her death to legal pundit Nancy Grace as her family and supporters call for authorities to execute an arrest warrant in the case.
More than 100 people reportedly gathered in Charlotte for a rally on Saturday. Supporters raised questions about the initial treatment of the investigation and pressured authorities to take action against her six travel companions who were absent for more than two-hour event even though she trusted them enough to travel thousands of miles to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and share a villa with them.
They want the #Cabo6 to come forward.
“Do y’all want justice for Shanquella?” asked Quovella Wilson, a minister who was among the first speakers at the Dec. 10 rally. “I said do you want justice for Shanquella?”
Weeks after the woman’s death, her parents Salamondra Robinson and Bernard Robinson, discovered that her travel companions lied about Shanquella’s death.
They told the Robinsons their 25-year-old daughter died of alcohol poisoning. Her best friend, Khalil Cooke, one of the travelers in the group, brought Shanquella’s luggage and other belongings to the family’s home and spent every day comforting them.
The group picked out clothes for the funeral they planned to attend, but when the death certificate arrived, they disappeared, Salamondra said. The certificate shows Shanquella died of a broken spinal cord and neck.
Soon after, the mother received a video of another woman lambasting Shanquella with a succession of blows in her head, neck and other parts of her body while her others stood by and watched and recorded the attack on their cellphones. Salamondra said the footage made her sick to her stomach. She believes her daughter was beaten to death.
“She wasn’t even fighting back. They attacked,” Salamondra said in a recent with Grace.
Shanquella Robinson Arrest Warrant
Mexican authorities have issued an arrest warrant for femicide – murder against a woman because of her gender. The Charlotte FBI field office has also opened an investigation into Shanquella’s death. The victim’s family said authorities had been mum about the warrant’s details and the investigation’s status.
Officials say they must extradite the suspect listed on the warrant so that they can face prosecution in Mexico, but Shanquella’s parents want everyone in the group to face charges for what they did. The family is still reeling from the shocking loss of the young entrepreneur and business student and questions why authorities are taking so long to make an arrest.
“This hurt. This hurt to the core,” said Bernard Robinson, “She was my only child. She had so much going for herself.”
Some at the rally questioned if the woman’s death investigation would have been handled differently from the beginning if she was another race. The story garnered a global spotlight after her mother came forward, and Black Twitter kept it alive through retweets, comments and hashtags.
Shanquella Robinson Rally
Photos from the rally show other women embracing Shanquella’s mother between pews at Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church on Saturday. A silver helium balloon on display spells out the slain woman’s name paired with balloon pillars topped with her first initial. There were two more balloons, flowers and two life-sized car photos of Shanquella. One of them is a cardboard cutout.
The event drew community leaders, activists and other concerned community members.
“I’m here to bring words of comfort to the Robinson family and to the community of Charlotte. I’m going to be honest, this is tough. This is hard,” Charlotte City Councilman Braxton Winston told WFAE. “How many words of comfort can you bring in a situation like this?”
Jonathan Dorrest, a former high school classmate of “Quella,” said she was a popular cheerleader with a good fashion sense. She owned an online bouquet and children’s hair braiding business while she worked on completing her studies a Winston-Salem State University right before her death.
“She was my personal stylist,” Dorrest said. “She loved to get dressed. She loved to get fresh. She was one call away from me always.”
“I feel like we don’t really understand how little time we have with the people we love,” Dorrest continued. “Life is fragile, fleeting, complex and confusing. We know all good things come to an end, yet we still have difficulty processing them. I wish this had never happened to Quella.”
Nancy Grace Interview
Although details of the woman’s death are still sketchy, a police report shows that medical personnel attended to the woman for hours before she died. In contrast, her death certificate shows she died within minutes of her injuries.
Salamondra is still trying to piece together the details, but she confirmed some of the events leading up to her daughter’s death during a recent interview with Grace on Nov. 28.
The mother said the woman in the viral video pounding on Shanquella is Daejhanae Jackson, who many suspected from the start. Salamondra also revealed that the video of the fight, which solidified her suspicions about Shanquella’s cause of death, was circulating before her daughter died.
“Someone called me and told me before they even arrived back to Charlotte, North Carolina, that they were over there fighting her, so I didn’t know how true it was,” Salamondra told Grace.
The mother said someone eventually posted it on Facebook and a friend saw it and sent it to her. By that time, Shanquella’s friends had already returned to North Carolina, at least two days after her Oct. 29 death.
“So after they got back and Shanquella had passed, the video had surfaced on Facebook, and someone sent it to my family,” she said.
Salamondra also revealed that her daughter liked to sleep in the nude and probably was sleeping right before the attack in the viral video.
“She was a good child and had a great heart, and she did not deserve to be treated like that,” the mother said.
