A woman has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of a television reporter last month while he was on assignment to cover the Super Bowl in New Orleans, authorities said Tuesday.
Adan Manzano, a 27-year-old reporter and anchor for Telemundo based in Kansas City, Missouri, was found dead Feb. 5 in his hotel room in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner. The next day, police arrested Danette Colbert, 48, on charges that she had stolen Manzano’s cellphone and bank cards.
Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley told a news conference streamed online Tuesday that a charge of second-degree murder had been added against Colbert, who remained jailed since her arrest last month. He said a suspected accomplice had been arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on theft and fraud charges.
The decision to charge Colbert in Manzano’s death was made despite preliminary autopsy results being inconclusive as to whether he was killed or died accidentally.
An attorney for Colbert, Stavros Panagoulopoulos, did not immediately respond to an email message seeking comment Tuesday. He said last month that police were making “assumptions and guesses” to link Colbert to Manzano’s death.
Dr. Gerry Cvitanovich, the Jefferson Parish coroner, told reporters that the autopsy found Manzano died from “positional asphyxia” as he was lying face down on a pillow and unable to breathe after ingesting a combination of alcohol and the depressant Xanax.
“Both of them are central nervous system depressants, and when you add them up, they’re really bad,” the coroner said, adding: “One of the dangers is you end up in a position where you are obstructing your ability to breathe.”
Conley said he was “very confident” authorities have enough evidence to successfully prosecute Colbert for murder, though he declined to discuss specifics of their case.
Police have previously said security video from the hotel where Manzano was staying showed him and Colbert entering his room together the day of his death. Footage showed Colbert leaving without him about an hour later. Authorities have said Colbert later used Manzano’s credit card to make a purchase at a New Orleans gas station and several stores in the area.
Police have also said Manzano’s medical records showed no prescriptions for Xanax or other depressants, and that they recovered the drug from Colbert’s home.
“Look, there’s a lot of pieces in this puzzle,” the police chief said. “We recognize it’s going to be a circumstantial case.”
As for the man charged with theft and fraud alongside Colbert, Conley said only that police had found “correspondence and information where they were going back and forth. So, we think they were working hand-in-hand in concert with each other.”
Last year, a Louisiana jury found Colbert guilty of theft and fraud charges in an unrelated case.
In 2022, Colbert was twice arrested in Las Vegas on felony charges of grand larceny and administering a drug to aid in a felony crime, court records show. In both cases, she was accused of drugging men in their hotel rooms and stealing from them. The charges were dismissed because the victims did not want to testify in court, Colbert’s attorney for those cases, Daniel Lippmann, told The Associated Press.
