A week ago a Canadian woman, Sheila Nabb, was found beaten and unconscious in a pool of blood in an elevator at a resort hotel in Mazatlan. Every bone in her face was broken.
According to Mexican police, the suspect has confessed. Making him repeat the confession at a press conference is horrendous legal procedure, but his account of what happened is…interesting.
Prior to the assault, Quintero said he had been drinking with a Canadian friend and “doing a line of cocaine.” He told reporters that he got into the elevator with the intention of riding to the top floor and gazing down at the lights of the resort city.
He says he encountered Nabb, who he said wasn’t wearing any clothes, at the sixth floor. When Quintero tried to prevent her from leaving he said she screamed, and he panicked.
“I didn’t try to abuse her, or I didn’t … I didn’t try to kill her or anything like … or rob her or anything. I was just afraid and I wanted to leave.”
Quintero said he covered Nabb’s mouth and asked her not to yell.
“But she continued yelling,” he said. “She got more afraid when I covered her mouth. And then I hit her … four or five times in the face with my fist. And then I left.”
The sequence of events reported is: Nabb tried to get off the elevator. He stopped her. She screamed. He covered her mouth. She got more afraid. He broke every bone in her face.
Every bone in her face.
She’s now in a medically induced coma.
this is unpossible, since it’s so very easy to escape an elevator:
But he panicked! He was in grave peril!
Gah, I can’t even manage more than two sarcastic defenses of this fucking idiot. And he tries to claim that she was naked when she got on the elevator?
A source talking on one of the tv reports confirmed that Nabb was naked, and added that when her husband woke up in the morning he found the door of their room open. It looks like sleepwalking.
Or, of course, she could have just decided she wanted some random stranger sex and that getting on an elevator naked would be the best way to make that happen…but there are flaws in that interpretation.
What I don’t understand is the absolute hatred of women that must be required for this kind of barbaric violence. I mean, even following this guy’s own logic (that he was scared and wanted her to stop screaming) there’s a fatal flaw. The amount of force required to knock this women unconscious (and therefore, stop her from screaming) has to be SIGNIFICANTLY less than the force required to break all those bones. My point being, that she was totally unresponsive (and therefore, no longer screaming) long before he stopped beating her. I can’t imagine any reason he could have kept on savagely beating a totally harmless, unconscious woman other than seething hatred.
F**k that this happened.
F**k that my first thought was that this validates being wary of men in elevators, instead of how horrible this is on its own.
F**K that there are people who would only take something this severe as evidence that there are reasons to be wary in elevators, and f**k that some people will still say that there aren’t any.
even if she did, i really don’t think having her face smashed in was in any way consensual (or even “asking for it”; because you know some douchebisquit will show up shortly and pull that line)
That’s precisely the thing with confined spaces: you lose the last bit of agency and control over the situation that stepping away from a potentially dangerous (or “creepy” or whatever) situation can provide.
what carlie said.
This whole thing sounds like an episode of Twilight Zone.
Jadehawk, I really hope you don’t think I was implying that the face-smashing was consensual or deserved or permissable or anything like that!
Her being naked is part of the story, but then again, failure to interpret that as sleepwalking or some other kind of brain-glitch is a bigger part of the story. My (implicit) point was that even a woman who actually wanted random stranger sex in the middle of the night wouldn’t look for it that way (and neither would a man). It’s dead easy to signal eager availibility without getting into an elevator naked.
There are 14 bones in the human face.
I’ve been in a LOT of fights in my life, I’ve been held down and punched, I’ve even been kicked in the face, and I’ve never had one of those bones broken. I’ve punched a lot of people in the face, and to my knowledge none of them suffered more than a broken nose. I’ve even hit someone when they were down out of fear, because the guy had about 6″ and 60 pounds on me. Didn’t break every bone in his face. MMA fighters punch each other in the face all the time and rarely even break each other’s noses. People in car accidents may break a couple of bones in their face, but probably not all of them.
To break every bone in someone’s face requires more than just punching. There’s a picture of the guy, and his hands aren’t in casts from breaking all of his fingers punching her in the face that hard. Whatever he did to her, it wasn’t “four or five punches” like he claims. What he needs to be charged with is attempted murder, because the level of violence involved is so far beyond hitting someone a couple of times and running away.
Damn!
She’s not in a coma anymore. She’s in a hospital in Calgary awaiting facial reconstruction surgery. Her jaw is wired shut, so it will be a while before we hear what happened from her. But yeah. Could someone calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to Richard Dawkins what it is that he’s not getting.
Joe – ah – informative.
He’s accused – but he denies it – of kicking her. The tape shows him kicking her. He says he was just pushing her hand back in so that the door would close.
There is also the possibility the suspect wasn’t involved at all.
Mazatlan is a tourist town, and the police will be wanting to close the case as soon as possible.
I’m… suspicious of the proceedings here, in general. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading entirely too many false confession stories over at Dispatches, or maybe it’s because of how almost literally unbelievable this story is…
I do hope they caught the right guy (and if not, that they’ll listen to the witness testimony of the victim and believe her if she says it was someone else), and that they figure out what he actually did… because it’s obvious his confession is a false story, pretty much regardless of whether this is a true or false confession.
no! definitely didn’t mean to imply that.
basically, I’m just preempting the inevitable slut-shaming that will start us sooner or later.
False confession… that’s an interesting theory. They have videotape apparently so that has to be taken into account. This is definitely a false story if the injuries are accurately described by the family, which I have no reason to doubt. Maybe he doesn’t really remember what happened because of the drinking and drugs, he may have blacked out. The odds of a blacked out drug user and a sleepwalker stumbling onto an elevator together seem pretty low but I guess stranger things have happened. Whoever beat her up seems pretty determined to kill her, in any case.
True about Mazatlan and the need to reassure the tourists. Convenient that the guy is fluent in English.
It makes me sick to know that I’m going to have to take advantage of this woman’s situation and bookmark this post the next time some JAQoff asks what’s wrong with asking for coffee.
Sometimes, I wake up to news so depressing that I simply cannot find words. This is horrible. There is no good in this at all, everything about it is a testament to the depths humans can sink to. Absolute cruelty. I really hope she pulls through…
Every damn time. Inevitable is exactly correct, and that fact alone adds a whole new layer to how terrible all of this is.
Brownian
Ditto.
I read this post to my husband, and mentioned Improbable Joe’s comment @ 10 that the guy’s hands aren’t even bandaged, and he said, “I smell some bullshit.” I totally agree. There is a lot that’s fishy with this story.
Given previous tourist horror stories coming out of Mexico, I don’t believe a damned thing the cops say. This may be the guy, or it may not.
@17 – A high stress situation like that? You don’t need to be blacked out to be fuzzy on the details.
The video tape kinda closes this case. It’s hard to argue that your evil twin did it (especially since the Evil Twin Moustache would have show up on the tape!).
That’s…that’s horrible!
So is this: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_778881.html?_s_icmp=NetworkHeadlines
I’m going to go cry now.
Is he ever going to acknowledge what a steamping pile that was?
That’s… *SMH*
I hope she pulls through.
I support Joe’s point that face bones are not that easy to break. I’ve seen it happen twice: once in sparring when someone fell onto a bench and once in a car accident. I’ve never seen anyone break a bone in the face with a punch or several punches. And if someone managed it, I agree that their hands wouldn’t be in good shape.
Elevators in fancy hotels tend to have handrails for some reason. I can imagine someone quite easily breaking someone’s face bones – or just about any bone – against such a rail.
That’s the end of my amateur forensic ghoulish behaviour, honest.
Isn’t this the sort of conscious-raising event Dawkins talks about?
Oh, damn, poor guy. Everyone treats him like some kind of criminal even though he said he wasn’t trying to kill her. Why couldn’t she just let it go? Was it really necessary to ruin his life over a harmless blunder?
With her apparently very brittle bones. I bet she had osteoporosis just because she hates men and wants sympathy.
I actually have seen someone fracture a face bone with a punch. A self-administered one at that. He had no injuries to his hands after. But that was a wee fracture. Not 14 shattered bones.
Discussing instances of violence against women is divisive and hurtful to men’s feelings. If we just stop talking about social problems, they’ll magically disappear.