'People heard screams in the middle of the night’: man allegedly beats girlfriend to death during Mexican getaway

A Thanksgiving trip to Mexico turned deadly for a Washington woman who headed south of the border with her boyfriend of three years.

Sativa Transue, 26, and Taylor Allen, 31, traveled to Cancun together over the holiday. At first, everything between the couple seemed okay, her sister said. “She sent beautiful pictures of the views on Friday, told me she was enjoying the sunshine, was snapchatting my daughter Amelia,” Mykayla Bolieu wrote on a GoFundMe. “Everything was fine. She was fine."

Friends, however, grew concerned when Transue sent them text messages on the evening of Nov. 26 saying she needed to get stitches after she allegedly got into an altercation with her boyfriend.

The next morning, Bolieu wrote on GoFundMe, “My sisters’ friends were so concerned when they still hadn’t heard from her first thing that they went to the police department, and then took any information they had to the FBI.”

A short time later, officials with the U.S. consulate told Transue’s mother that her daughter was found dead in a Cancun hotel room, Bolieu told KOMO. “The sound of her scream and her cry — I have never been so heartbroken in my life," she recalled.

According to Bolieu, other guests at the hotel "heard screams in the middle of the night and they said nothing. In the morning, my sister, they found, they found her dead, beaten to death.”

The victim’s boyfriend was arrested and is currently being held in a Mexican prison.

“We want justice," said Bolieu about her sister, adding, "She was kind to everyone, she was definitely a light in all of our lives. She was just the best person I ever met.”