A woman was accused of second degree murder in the death of a television reporter last month while assigned to cover the Super Bowl in New Orleans, authorities said on Tuesday.
Adan Manzano, a 27 -year -old reporter and presenter of Telemundo based in Kansas City, Missouri, was found dead on February 5 in his hotel room in the Kenner suburb of New Orleans. The next day, the police arrested Danette Colbert, 48, for charges that he had stolen the cell phone and apple bank cards.
Kenner’s chief of police, Keith Conley, said on an online press conference on Tuesday that a second -degree murder charge against Colbert had been added, who remained imprisoned since his arrest last month. He said that a suspicious accomplice had been arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for theft and fraud charges.
The decision to accuse Colbert in the death of Manzano was taken despite the fact that the preliminary results of the autopsy are not conclusive if he was killed or died accidentally.
A Colbert lawyer, Stavros Panagoulopoulos, did not immediately respond to an email message for comments on Tuesday. He said last month that the police were doing “assumptions and conjectures” to link Colbert with Manzano’s death.
Dr. Gerry Cvitanovich, a forensic of the Jefferson parish, told journalists that the autopsy found that Manzano died of “positional suffocation” while he was lying face down and could not breathe after ingesting a combination of alcohol and the Xanax depressor.
“Both are depressants of the central nervous system, and when they add them, they are really bad,” said the coroner, adding: “One of the dangers is that you end up in a position where you are obstructing your ability to breathe.”
Conley said that “very safe” authorities have enough evidence to successfully process Colbert for murder, although he refused to discuss details of his case.
Police said that the hotel security video where Manzano showed him and Colbert already entering his room on his room. The images showed that Colbert left without him about an hour later. The authorities have said that Colbert then used the Manzano credit card to make a purchase at a New Orleans service station and several stores in the area.
Police also said that Manzano’s medical records did not show recipes for Xanax or other depressants, and that they recovered the drug from Colbert’s house.
“Look, there are many pieces on this puzzle,” said the police chief. “We recognize that it will be a circumstantial case.”
As for the man accused of theft and fraud with Colbert, Conley said that only the police had found “correspondence and information to which they went and went. Then we believe they were working hand in hand with each other.”
Last year, a Louisian jury found Colbert guilty of robbery and fraud charges in an unrelated case.
In 2022, Colbert was arrested twice in Las Vegas for charges for serious crimes of large theft and administering a drug to help in a serious crime, as shown in the judicial records. In both cases, she was accused of drugs in her hotel rooms and stealing them. The charges were dismissed because the victims did not want to testify in the Court, said Colbert’s lawyer in those cases, Daniel Lippmann, to The Associated Press.
