“I’m literally in pain and pacing around the apartment,” Kandace Florence texted her boyfriend in the early hours of Oct. 30. “I’m shaking.”
The pair were thousands of miles apart, with the 28-year-old Florence staying in an Airbnb in Mexico City with two friends, Jordan Marshall and Courtez Hall. The trio would be found dead hours after the unnerving messages were sent to Victor Day. On Thursday, the travelers’ deaths were attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning, according to a post-mortem analysis obtained by the Associated Press.
Security guards at the apartment complex where the Americans had been staying in the neighborhood of La Rosita reported “an intense smell of gas” in a unit, according to local police. A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office told ABC News that investigators had found a failure in the apartment’s gas boiler, which could have released a lethal amount of the colorless, odorless gas. The faulty boiler may have been activated by one of the three attempting to take a shower, the spokesperson added.
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An investigation into the deaths remains ongoing, supervised by officials with the U.S. Embassy there.
Day, 30, had reassured himself that his girlfriend was going to be OK, despite the texts that were flooding in. “I feel like I’ve been drugged,” Florence had written to him, according to El País. “Like I’ve taken ecstasy, but I haven’t.”
Believing she had been dosed while out celebrating el Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, Day reasoned that she would sleep the effects of any drugs in her system off. He recalled to the Spanish-language newspaper that Florence had then FaceTimed him.
“She was visibly suffering,” he said.
He expanded on this final exchange to People on Thursday, telling the magazine that she had “clearly” been vomiting. “She’s been crying,” Day remembered. “I mean her whole face was wet, crying or vomiting or maybe she splashed water on her face.”
The call, according to Day, began just before 5 a.m. his time, and he dozed off shortly after picking up to see Florence in distress. He woke up about 10 minutes later to see a “pitch-black” screen, “as if she put the phone down or the phone fell.”
“But I could hear something going on in the background and I put the phone to my ear, and it sounds like her vomiting or dry heaving, or both,” Day said. Sure that Florence would be fine in the morning, he went back to sleep.
“That, to me, is what eats me up,” he said.
When Florence didn’t respond to his texts the next morning, it finally “clicked” for Day, and he reached out to the short-term rental property’s host, he said, telling her that “something is terribly wrong.”
The host agreed to send security into the apartment to check on her guests. When she returned to Day to tell him that Florence, Marshall, and Hall had been found “unresponsive without vital signs,” it didn’t feel real to him. “I refused to believe that they were dead,” he said.
Florence, an entrepreneur who founded an affirmational candle-making company called Glo Through It, would have turned 29 on Thursday. “She was a dreamer, ‘dreamer’ meaning she wanted to make a difference in the lives of other people,” her mother, Freida Florence, told WAVY earlier this week.
“She was just a beautiful soul,” Day told CNN. “She was a spark of light. She was very friendly, a perfect human being. That’s what hurts the most.”
Marshall, also 28, was an old friend of Florence’s from Virginia Beach. The two had graduated from Kellam High School together in 2011, and remained close, even as Marshall moved out to New Orleans to begin his career as a teacher.
“He was a bright ray of light, and anyone who came in contact with him never forgot him. We’ve been getting so much love and support from people from all over,” Marshall’s mother, who traveled to Mexico City to identify her son’s body, told CNN. “Jordan was very intellectual and curious. He loved to be immersed in different cultures. He was very passionate about his students and was a very passionate educator.”
Marshall had been teaching in New Orleans alongside the 33-year-old Hall. “My son was a joyous child,” Ceola Hall, his mother, remembered to WDSU. “He loved me, he loved his family. He loved to make everyone laugh.”
Airbnb, calling the deaths a “terrible tragedy,” said in a statement that its “priority right now is supporting those impacted as the authorities investigate what happened.”
The trio’s bodies are expected to be repatriated back to their families in the United States in the coming days.
