Colorado University student David Parrish had traveled in Africa, Europe and Latin America. But visiting Puerta Vallerta, Mexico during his spring break proved to be his undoing.
Details are sketchy about the 21-year-old’s murder. What we know for sure is that he was killed at 4:20 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26. The CU junior was shopping along the boulevard with his mother, Janet Graaff, a CU instructor.
Apparently, when his mother was accosted by two men trying to rob her, David came to her aid and was shot in the abdomen, by some accounts, and in the heart, by other accounts. He died almost immediately.
According to the U.S. embassy, two men have been arrested in the killing. A Mexican newspaper reported that Daniel Vargas Castañeda was one of the men. The other is identified as Alfonso Ramirez Sastre.
The murder has the seeds of an international controversy, in that Sastre should have been sitting out a jail sentence. But he may have been released a few days earlier with the complicity of a Mexican judge, his secretary and two jail employees.
Mexican officials have detained the two jail employees, but to date have not found the judge or his secretary. Officials also suspended the city’s public safety director pending an investigation of the jail release.
The murder has other international connections as well, as David was great-nephew of Sir De Villiers Graaff, a long-time politician and apartheid opposition leader in the Union of South Africa. Although David was reared in Boulder, CO, he valued his mother’s African roots and had traveled there. He studied in Rabat, Morocco the spring semester of his sophomore year.
In a statement issued by the family and published by the Denver Post, Parrish is remembered for his "truth with humour and kindness, justice with love and fairness, and beauty in all things. These were David’s principles and how his family will remember him.”
"He was one of the most good-hearted people I’d ever met," according to one of his friends.