Families of US college students allegedly drugged at Cancun resort recount terrifying ordeal, still fear for their safety

A resort getaway turned nightmare has college students fearing for their lives and scrambling to get back to the United States after an alleged drug bust in Mexico.

(Video credit: CBS Texas)

Firsthand accounts and details from family members shed light on the experience of Oklahoma State University students vacationing in Cancun before suspected synthetic fentanyl poisoning triggered a costly evacuation effort.

Speaking from her hospital room in Texas before returning home on Sunday, Zara Hull was spotted with boyfriend Jake Snider as she told CBS: “We just had a pool day.”

“We both grabbed water and after two minutes, Jake had turned around and we both hit the bar, upside down at the same time,” she explained.

“There's no other explanation for this. Two girls don't fall at the same time,” friend Kaylie Pritzer he said KWTV of his own experience on August 1. “The last memory I have is just walking around the pool.”

Hull had said Fox 32“I had called my mom at like 10 that morning to tell her how beautiful the resort was and how amazing it was. At 4:30, Jake called her and let her know that I was completely incoherent, like he's gone, like he's unconscious.”

In a post on social media, Jake's mother Stephanie Snider detailed what happened after her son had traveled with Hull to what was described as a private hospital that each had said the doors were only locked from from the outside

After putting Hull on a ventilator and telling them they intended to transport her to another location for an MRI, Snider recalled, “[Jake] he told them to LEAVE EVERYTHING that is taking him away. We told him, “Don't let them take her, DON'T let them do anything else to her, we were working to get them out!”

“We believe they were planning to take her away to be trafficked or maybe even harvest her organs (which we were later told is a common thing to do). Most likely they would have also something to my son, possibly even death,” Fox News reported while Snider commented, “That hit home for me tonight as I sit here and think about just a week ago that our worst nightmare”.

“This time on Friday night we were in constant contact with my son on the phone while his girlfriend was in the so-called ICU in a hospital in Mexico … so sedated she couldn't open her eyes or speak,” he to add

Jake had told CBS, “It was basically just me and Zara in this hospital that had hundreds of rooms.”

An effort to raise the money needed to bring the students home crowdfunding and eventually a private jet was charted out to take them to Dallas after Hull recounted from the hospital, “They had increased the money they wanted. The baseline was $10,000 because they even look at me. They were holding me captive. .. We are university students; we don't have the money they are asking for”.

After arriving in Texas, she told CBS, “When we got here, I couldn't breathe on my own. They would try to take the ventilator off me, and every time my lungs would stop.”

Her mother explained to KWTV, “Right now, the evacuation number is about $60,000.”

The families expressed a wish not to name the complex or the hospital out of fear for their own safety, and Hull told CBS, “It's unknown, and it could put all of our families in danger.”

Snider's post noted, “For Jake, he will never forget the hell he went through to get Zara and himself out of there alive. For Zara and Kaylie, they have horrible feelings just from what we told them happen and yet they don't remember at all during the test, but they are tortured by the fact that it happened to them.”

Hull added, “We will never leave the United States.” They say the complex is the safest place; don't let it This is not true.”

Staff writer

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College, where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and seeker of truth, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and dog, and when he's not researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel the

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