A resort getaway turned nightmare left college students fearing for their lives and struggling to return to the United States after an alleged drugging in Mexico.
(Video Credit: CBS Texas)
First-hand accounts and details from family members shed light on the experience of Oklahoma State University students vacationing in Cancun before a suspected synthetic fentanyl poisoning sparked a costly evacuation effort.
Speaking from her hospital room in Texas before eventually returning home Sunday, Zara Hull was seen with her boyfriend Jake Snider when she told CBS, “We just had a pool day.”
“We both got water and within two minutes, Jake had turned around and we both hit the bar, heads down at the same time,” she explained.
“There’s no other explanation for this. Two girls don’t just drop at the same time,” friend Kaylie Pritzer told KWTV of her own experience on Aug. 1. “The last memory I have is just walking in the pool.”
Hull had told Fox 32, “I had called my mom at like 10 that morning to tell her how beautiful the resort was and how amazing it was. By 4:30, Jake called her and let her know that I was completely incoherent, like I was gone, like I was unconscious.”
In a post on social media, Jake’s mother, Stephanie Snider, detailed what unfolded after her son had traveled with Hull to what was described as a private hospital that each had said the doors only locked from the outside.
After they had put Hull on a ventilator and explained they intended to transport her elsewhere for an MRI, Snider recalled, “[Jake] told them to STOP EVERYTHING he’s taking her out. We told him, ‘Do NOT let them take her, do NOT let them do anything else to her–we were working on getting them out!'”
“We believe they were planning to take her away to be trafficked or perhaps even to take her organs (which is what we were later told is a common thing that is done). They most likely would have done something to my son as well, possibly even death,” Fox News reported as Snider commented, “This is really hitting home tonight as I sit here and think about just one week ago today our worst nightmare started.”
“This time last Friday night we were in constant contact with my son on the phone while his girlfriend was in the so-called ICU in a Mexico hospital…so sedated that she couldn’t open her eyes or speak,” she added.
Jake had told CBS, “Basically, it was just me and Zara in this hospital that had hundreds of rooms.”
An effort to gather the money needed to get the students home included crowdfunding and ultimately a private plane was charted that brought them to Dallas after Hull recounted of the hospital, “They had increased the money they wanted. The baseline was $10,000 for them to even look at me. They were holding me captive… We’re college students; we don’t have the money they’re asking for.”
After arriving in Texas, she told CBS, “When we got here, I could not breathe on my own. They would try to get me off the ventilator, and every time my lungs would just stop.”
Her mother explained to KWTV, “The evacuation number is about $60,000, at this point.”
The families expressed their desire not to name the resort or hospital for fear of their own safety and Hull told CBS, “There’s no telling, and that could put our entire families in jeopardy.”
Snider’s post noted, “For Jake, he is never going to forget the hell he went through to get Zara and himself out of there alive. For Zara and Kaylie, they have horrible feelings of only what we told them happened to them and yet no memory at all during the ordeal–but are tortured by the fact it happened to them.”
Hull added, “We’re not going to leave the United States ever gain. They say the resort is the safest place; don’t leave it. That’s not true.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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