A television sports journalist who was found dead in his hotel room near New Orleans while covering Super Bowl LIX had the presence of a sedative in his system – a kind of pharmaceutical drug for which he did not have a prescription and was later seized from the home of a woman who is charged with robbing him, an investigator testified recently.
Adan Manzano had a benzodiazepine in his body at the time of his death in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner on 5 February, four days before the Super Bowl, local police detective Jeffrey Fitzmorris said at a criminal court hearing on Tuesday.
Fitzmorris’s testimony seemed to bolster law enforcement’s prevailing theory that the woman accused of robbing him, 48-year-old Danette Colbert, may first have drugged him with the intent of at least sedating him. Police have alleged that they found alprazolam – which is a benzodiazepine commonly sold as Xanax – at Colbert’s home after Manzano’s death.
The drug had not been prescribed to either of them.
Beside treating anxiety and panic, alprazolam can serve as a muscle relaxant or sedative. Mixing it with alcohol can be deadly, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Nonetheless, as of Fitzmorris’s testimony, Colbert had not been charged directly in connection with the death of Manzano, a reporter for the Spanish-language channel Telemundo Kansas City as well as a 27-year-old widowed father of a toddler. His cause and manner of death remained unclassified pending the results of complete toxicology tests following up on a preliminary screen done on Manzano as part of his autopsy.
Fitzmorris’s sworn testimony referred to the preliminary screen, the Jefferson parish coroner, Gerry Cvitanovich, said on Wednesday.
“You always want to make sure you get an official reading,” Cvitanovich said. “That’s what we are waiting for.”
Two government officials of Jefferson parish, Louisiana, which contains Kenner, confirmed the essence of Fitzmorris’s testimony.
Authorities arrested Colbert, 48, on various criminal counts after they said surveillance video captured her entering Manzano’s hotel room with him the last time he was seen alive. They said they later caught her with his cellphone as well as the credit card he used to check into his hotel.
And they also accused her of being in possession of alprazolam without a prescription – which is illegal – at her home in Slidell, Louisiana, another New Orleans suburb.
Fitzmorris’s testimony came at a bail hearing for Colbert. A judge ordered her held without bail, with authorities having made it clear that they suspect she may have drugged Manzano shortly before his death and then robbed him, citing other previous cases in which she was formally accused of doing that to other men.
One led to Colbert’s conviction in October on charges that she drugged and incapacitated a man whom she met on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street – which is lined with drinking establishments – before robbing him of more than $134,000, much of it in cryptocurrency. She was sentenced to five years’ probation.
Colbert’s attorney, Stavros Panagoulopoulos, told the Associated Press that authorities are making assumptions about Colbert’s connection to Manzano’s death.
“We’re looking forward to our day in court to present all the evidence as necessary,” Panagoulopoulos said. “Assumptions and guesses are not enough to maintain criminal prosecution and we look forward to providing further information as this case moves forward.”
Manzano arrived in Kenner on assignment with Telemundo Kansas City to report on the city’s football team, the Chiefs, as they prepared to play and ultimately lose to the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl at New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome on 9 February.
Hotel staff checked on Manzano and discovered his death after he missed a work meeting.
Surveillance camera images released by police showed Manzano and Colbert together on Bourbon Street before they walked into his room at a hotel near New Orleans’s international airport in Kenner during the early morning of 5 February. Colbert eventually left alone, surveillance video established.
The investigators who worked to arrest Colbert began theorizing relatively that she may have drugged Manzano for at least two major reasons.
In addition to the presence of anti-anxiety medication both in Manzano’s body and at Colbert’s home, they also came across online news stories documenting allegations out of Las Vegas that she had drugged men and then robbed them after they slipped into unconsciousness.
Colbert has fallen under law enforcement scrutiny as federal officials in Las Vegas pursue a case against a 43-year-old woman named Aurora Phelps, who was recently arrested in Mexico on charges that she used online dating apps to lure at least four older men to meet her in person, drugged them with sedatives and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them.
Three of the men died, and Phelps has been charged in one of their deaths, said authorities, who gave no indication that their case against her had any relation to that of Manzano and Colbert.
Manzano was originally from Mexico and graduated from Kansas State University. He developed a reputation for covering the Kansas City area’s various sports teams with dedication and passion.
His survivors include a two-year-old daughter whom he was raising with his wife, Ashleigh Boyd, an elementary school teacher who had been killed in a car crash in Topeka, Kansas, on 11 April 2024.
A funeral mass in commemoration of Manzano was held on 20 February at a Topeka church named after Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is venerated by Mexican Catholics as their country’s patron saint.
