Knull and Schwander alleged that their illness is related to the pesticides used at the hotel during their stay on the property.
Knull said that even after they changed rooms the symptoms remained, “That night, we both woke up soaked in sweat at like four in the morning and kind of terrified, and we booked a flight home before the sun came up.”
After they returned to Colorado, a doctor diagnosed their symptoms as “likely organophosphate poisoning”—a strong support of Knull’s judgment that their health scare was related to the pesticides used by the resort.
Tourist Deaths
On May 30, Cynthia Day, 49, and Nathaniel Holmes, 63, a couple from Maryland, were found dead at one of the hotel chain’s resorts after they missed their scheduled check-out time. They were found in their room at the Bahia Principe hotel just five days after another American, Miranda Schaup-Werner, 41, from Pennsylvania was found dead in the same resort.Both Day and Holmes had internal bleeding, including in their pancreases and fluid in their lungs. Day also had fluid in her brain, based on a statement from Attorney General Jean Alain Rodriguez Sanchez’s office.
“It should have never happened,” Dajuan Holmes-Hamilton, Nathaniel Holmes’ daughter, told the news outlet.
The death of the Pennsylvanian woman, Schaup-Werner, also should never have happened.
Schaup-Werner in checked in the hotel on May 25 with her husband, Daniel Werner. They were celebrating their wedding anniversary.
“Daniel and all of us are in a state of disbelief, we are shocked. She was perfectly content, everything seemed fine,” Jay McDonald, Daniel’s brother-in-law, told Fox.
She was declared dead at the scene by local paramedics who had arrived to try and resuscitate her.
Just as with the Maryland couple, Schaup-Werner’s cause of death was determined as respiratory failure and pulmonary edema, which is caused by excess fluid in the lungs, according to Dominican authorities.
“[Daniel] wants his wife’s body home,” McDonald told Fox. “We want [an investigation] to be done domestically.”