Rebecca Zahau — the victim — Credit: editorial-use
Rebecca Mawii Zahau, also known as Rebecca Nalepa, was a Burmese American woman born in Falam, Chin State, in what was then Burma. Raised in a Protestant family of Chin ethnicity, she lived in Nepal and Germany before moving to the United States about a decade before her death; by 2011 most of her family lived in Saint Joseph, Missouri. She worked as an ophthalmic technician until December 2010 and divorced her first husband in February 2011. From 2008 she was in a relationship with her boyfriend, a pharmaceutical-company executive, and by July 2011 the couple were staying at a beach house he used as a summer home in Coronado, California.
On July 11, 2011, the boyfriend's six-year-old son, Max Shacknai, fell from a second-floor banister at the Coronado house while Zahau and the boy's teenage aunt were the only other people present; he suffered severe spinal and facial injuries and was hospitalized in critical condition. Investigators later ruled the fall accidental, though a treating trauma doctor told police the boy's injuries seemed inconsistent with the cardiac arrest and brain swelling he experienced, raising the possibility that he stopped breathing before he fell. He died of his injuries on July 16, 2011. Two days after the fall, on the morning of July 13, Zahau's boyfriend's brother, who had arrived from out of state and was staying at the house, reported finding her nude body hanging from a second-floor balcony, her wrists and ankles bound with her hands behind her back; he said he cut the body down before police arrived. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
On September 2, 2011, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department announced that its investigation had found no evidence of foul play in either death, ruling Zahau's death a suicide and Max's fall an accident; investigators said they found no DNA at the scene besides Zahau's own. Zahau's autopsy identified four areas of head trauma, which the county medical examiner attributed to her striking the balcony as she fell. A second autopsy commissioned by her family concluded that fractures in her throat indicated manual strangulation rather than hanging, and that her death was a homicide. An attorney for Zahau's family said the investigation had overlooked other evidence, including signs that she had been sexually assaulted before her death. Investigators also found a painted message on a door near the balcony that read, according to Zahau's ex-husband, 'She saved him, can he save her,' which they treated as further evidence of suicide; Zahau's siblings said the handwriting did not match hers. Zahau's family, saying she had shown no signs of depression and held religious objections to suicide, publicly rejected the ruling and raised funds for an independent investigation.
The family filed a $10 million wrongful-death lawsuit naming numerous defendants before narrowing its focus to the boyfriend's brother. In April 2018, a civil jury, applying the lower burden of proof used in civil cases, found him responsible for Zahau's death and awarded her family a $5.2 million judgment. The Sheriff's Office and the County Medical Examiner's Department then reopened their review of the case; in November 2018, the Chief Medical Examiner reported that the original findings had been correctly reached and reaffirmed that Zahau's death was a suicide. In February 2019, before an appeal of the civil verdict was decided, the Zahau family agreed to a $600,000 settlement, and the $5.2 million judgment was vacated with prejudice.
Rebecca Zahau was found hanging at her boyfriend's Coronado, California, home in July 2011, two days after his young son fell from a staircase in the same house; her death was ruled a suicide, a finding her family has publicly disputed.
