An Instagram model had just celebrated her 24th birthday and was supposed to be enjoying a fun night partying with friends at a warehouse soiree on Friday night, but hours after the music stopped, she was found dead and her friend was hospitalized in critical condition.
Christy Giles’ lifeless body was dumped on the sidewalk outside of Southern California Hospital in Culver City at roughly 5 p.m. on Saturday. Two hours later, her friend Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola turned up in critical condition at another hospital and now investigators are looking into whether the partying nightmare involved foul play.
LAPD homicide detectives told KTLA that they’re examining whether sexual assault had been apart of the fateful events that preceded Giles’ death and left Cabrales-Arzola, 26, fighting for her life at a hospital in West Los Angeles.
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Giles’ now widowed husband, Jan Cilliers, suspects that his wife, an aspiring actress whose thousands of Instagram followers are mourning her death, and her friend, an interior designer who had recently moved to L.A., fell victim to predators.
“People share these amazing videos that they have with her, and it just brings back her energy, and I know I’ll never get to see her or kiss her or touch her again, and it’s just so heartbreaking,” Cilliers told KABC in an interview.
Piecing together the timeline as he scrutinizes what went wrong that night, Cilliers said that he has seen his wife’s final text exchanges before she died.
“I’ve got all the messages that she exchanged with anybody else that night and she was texting Marcela, the girl that she was with, at 5:30 saying let's get out of here with the wide eye emoji,” he said, adding that he believes at some point the two women became incapacitated.
Cilliers said that after checking iCloud, he gleaned that no further messages were sent or checked after that.
Cilliers told the outlet that doctors had discovered heroin in Cabrales-Arzola’s system—a drug he says neither woman had a history of using.
“Marcela's toxicology report came back, and I guess they found heroin in her system, which is nothing that either of those girls would ever do, not voluntarily,” Cilliers said.
Police said that an overdose was a possibility, KTLA reported, although a complete autopsy from the Coroner’s Office will determine Giles’ cause of death.
According to a GoFundMe page, Giles’ friends and family are hoping to raise funds to pay for funeral costs and for a private investigator to examine their suspicions that “three men in an all black, masked in bandanas; with license plates removed” dropped Giles at the hospital before driving Cabrales-Arzola to a different hospital a couple hours later. Authorities have not confirmed details regarding potential suspects.
Cabrales-Arzola remains “on life support with no brain activity with little possibility of recovery,” the GoFundMe page states.
Cilliers, and a friend of Giles, Sandy Evangelista Robinson, told KTLA that they’ve received messages from other people who were familiar with the men they believe were involved in the tragic night, and that others had shared stories of negative experiences with the men.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever get closure unless there’s justice against these men,” Robinson said.
In a tribute on Instagram featuring clips of his wife dancing whimsically and playing guitar, Cilliers wrote: “How can this world be so cruel. How can people be so evil. You were the light of my sky. Guiding stars of my journey, The twinkle in my eye.”
