The small, intimate community with a hippie vibe was a good fit for a mother who once created a multiracial community in the “whites only” area of South Africa, and a well-traveled son who, his family said, saw “beauty in all things.”
About 30 miles up the coast from this popular tourist town sits the small fishing community of Sayulita.
It’s a place people go to get away from the spring break crowds and seven-day all-inclusive resorts to the south. Here colorful little restaurants surround el centro, the town’s brick central plaza. Mexicans and people from the north intermingle, and along the white beaches, surfers praise the waves.
Last week, Boulder resident Janet Graaff and her son, David Parrish, bought their own little piece of life here, a vacation home previously owned by an elderly couple.
On Wednesday, March 26, after closing on the house, Graaff, a University of Colorado instructor, and Parrish, 21, a CU student, drove to Puerto Vallarta to buy furniture to fill it.
There, along a busy street across from the port where enormous cruise ships unload passengers, the unheard of happened.
Two men, strangers until a few days earlier, attempted to rob Graaff. When Parrish came to her rescue, one of the men shot him dead.
Days later, the case got worse.
One of the men – believed to have been the killer – posed as another inmate about to be released from jail. He walked free, and with the aid of another man, disappeared from town.
The escape of 30-year-old Alfonso Ramirez Sastre quickly became an embarrassment for Mexican authorities, who have launched a countrywide search to find him and an internal investigation into how he escaped. It also has them worried Parrish’s death will scare away tourists – the Puerto Vallarta’s lifeblood at almost 3 million visitors per year.
On Friday, the newly appointed head of public security sat behind a large wooden desk, typed notes spread out before him, and expressed deep regret to Parrish’s family – Graaff, her ex-husband, Steve Parrish, and daughter Leslie Parrish.