The family of an aspiring model from New York who was found brutally slain near a resort town in Jamaica have gone to the island to retrieve her body.
Desiree Gibbon, 26, was found in bushes along an isolated road on Sunday with her throat slashed, her family says.
She had been working as a bartender in order to save money for film college, according to her mother.
Police have identified her body, but no arrests have yet been made, and no suspected motive has been released.
Her “blood-caked” body was found on Sunday in the town of Anchovy, several miles outside the tourist resort town of Montego Bay, the website LoopJamaica.com first reported.
Ms Gibbon’s grieving family had crowd-funded over $22,000 (£16,000) online in order to raise money to travel to the island to retrieve her body for burial in New York.
“We were very close, so you can imagine, when I got the news, ‘devastated’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” Ms Gibbon’s mother, Andrea Cali-Gibbon, told the New York Daily News.
She said that her daughter wanted to be a travel documentarian, and she had once taught English to children in Brazil.
“She wanted to travel to countries and try things and experience cultures,” her mother said.
Ms Gibbon’s remains were identified by family members, who reportedly own a nearby hotel in Jamaica.
Jamaican authorities have not released a suspected motive, and so far have released few details about her murder.
“My belief is that it was a cold, calculated, planned-out murder,” Mrs Gibbon said.
“It wasn’t a random act of violence. It somebody she knew and it’s somebody she trusted,” she claimed.
She said her daughter had left the resort where she had been staying without her purse, money or identification documents.
Her father, who is Jamaican, told the Jamaica Observer newspaper that she “had to have been lured from that hotel because she had nothing on her”.
