Cayley Mandadi was beaten to death by her boyfriend, Mark Howerton. But the defense has other explanations as to how she could have died.
Cayley Mandadi, 19, a sophomore at Trinity University, was last seen alive at a San Antonio music festival with her boyfriend Mark Howerton, 22, on Oct. 29, 2017.
Howerton told police that on the night of the concert the couple took party drugs and had consensual sex. At some point, Cayley stopped breathing. He said he rushed her to the nearest hospital, where medical teams tried multiple ways to save her.
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"Even the most explicit television shows don't show you what I saw that day," Alison Steele, Cayley's mother, tells "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant about when she first saw her daughter at the hospital. "Did she fall out of an airplane? Was she thrown off a bridge?" Mandadi was declared brain dead and taken off life support. Investigators believed the injuries pointed to murder. The medical examiner ruled that she died of blunt force trauma to the face and head. Howerton was arrested on February 28, 2018 and charged with sexual assault, murder and later with kidnapping. Prosecutors thought it was an open-and-shut case, though it would prove anything but. Complicating the investigation was that there were no witnesses.
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