Video Shows Cops Roughed Up Abigail Before She Died by ‘Suicide’ in Jail Cell

A 30-year-old woman from the state of Oaxaca who was arrested and found dead five hours later in her cell was roughed up by a group of women cops, a new video shows. 

Abigail Hay Urrutia was arrested in the town of Salina Cruz on August 19 after having a discussion with her boyfriend that allegedly turned physical. 

She was found dead inside her jail later that day, hanging from one of the bars with her underwear tied around her neck, according to an official report. 

Authorities first ruled her death as a suicide, but new video circulated by Hay’s sister, Margarita Hay, raises more questions around the official version of what happened that afternoon. 

Footage from a security camera inside the police building in Salina Cruz shows three female police officers dragging Hay into the headquarters’ narrow hall. One of the cops grabs Hay from her neck and throws her to the ground, where she lies immobile for a few seconds before standing up. The same cop then wraps her arm around her neck from behind, as Hay starts jumping up and down. 

The video—which has no audio—then shows another policewoman coming out of an office and the other cops say something to her. Hay grabs what looks like the bars of a cell and the cops stand behind her before the video ends.

The video is part of the official files of the investigation and was leaked to Margarita. She also got a photo of a message carved in one of the cell's metal doors, allegedly left by Abigail.

“The message says something like ‘You wanted me dead? Well, here I am’,” Margarita said. “But the thing that makes it unbelievable is that Abigail wrote her name in the wrong way. She wrote ‘Ahby’, when she always wrote her name as ‘Abi’.”  

“Is that what suicide looks like?” Margarita said to VICE World News. “Why did they have to treat her like that?” 

Margarita said that the cops violated her sister’s rights from the moment she was arrested. In the first video of her detention, Hay is seen struggling with the police as she is forced into a cop car. 

“I’m the mother of your child,” Hay is heard saying on the video to her boyfriend.

Hay was arrested minutes after 4 p.m., according to official records. But her family wasn’t notified of her detention until she was already dead, at around 11 p.m. that night. 

“No one called us, no one reached us to say she had been arrested. It was until she was dead that they called my dad,” Margarita said. 

Oaxaca state authorities have done three different autopsies on Hay’s body so far, according to the state prosecutor’s office, and concluded she died from asphyxia. But they haven’t yet made clear if it was a suicide or a murder, according to the latest results. 

The three policemen involved in her arrest and the judge who ordered to put her in jail were arrested later in August, according to Oaxaca’s General Attorney Office.

During the last state government administration, authorities registered more than 650 femicides, 87 of them during the first half of 2022, according to official figures.

Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s main mezcal-producing states that is hugely popular with tourists, has some of the highest rates of gender violence in Mexico.