At trial, widow of Arlington firefighter found dead in Cancun window seeks $35M
.jpg "Arlington, Texas firefighter Elijah Snow was found dead in Cancun, Mexico, in 2021. His wife is suing the hotel where the couple was staying at the time of his death. The civil trial is underway in a Tarrant County courtroom.")
Over about 10 hours, employees of a Mexican hotel again and again served drinks to Elijah Snow.
On the day in July 2021 that he arrived in Cancun with his wife for a weeklong vacation, Snow drank at the pool. At the lobby bar. At the martini bar.
Over dinner at one of the restaurants at the hotel, Royalton Chic Cancun Resort & Spa, the couple ordered a bottle of sake.
The all-inclusive resort is among the properties in the peninsula’s luxury hotel corridor. Its staff overserved Snow, did not follow its protocol on the response to people reported missing, as Snow was, and failed to carry out in practice other security procedures, his widow’s attorney told a Tarrant County district court jury on Wednesday as evidence presentation in a civil trial in the case got underway.
Elijah Snow may have been found alive had Royalton Chic employees acted in accordance with the hotel’s policy, which describes at what point and in what way it should alert the police of a missing guest, the attorney, Wes Bearden, said in his opening statement. Staff rebuffed Jamie Snow’s reports that she woke in the couple’s room in the night and found that her husband was not in the room, Bearden said. At 7:24 a.m., Elijah Snow’s body was found lodged in a window on the property of a hotel next door.
Elijah Snow, an Arlington firefighter whose father died in the line of duty while the elder man was employed by the same department, was at the Royalton Chic to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary. Jamie Snow is an educator who lives in Kennedale.
The Sunset Royal Beach Hotel, the neighboring property on which Elijah’s body was found, is not among the defendants in the lawsuit. Instead, Jamie and the couple’s two children, girls who are now 10 and 8, sued RCM Hotel, Royalton Chic’s operator, and Blue Diamond Hotels and Resorts Inc. and its parent company, Sunwing Travel Group Inc.
When evidence presentation and argument in the trial ends in the 17th District Court in Tarrant County, the jury will be asked to determine who is at fault for Elijah’s death — the hotel and its associated companies or Elijah himself. If it finds the defendants were negligent, the jury will perhaps assign a financial value to the result of Elijah’s loss. Bearden told the jury that he would ask for $35 million.
The Snows were expecting a week of paradise and instead are left with “a lifetime of hell,” Bearden said in his opening statement.
A retired economics professor hired by the plaintiff calculated that Elijah’s relatives suffered, because of his death, an economic loss of $3,045,299 in the expert’s projection of earnings and benefits. Elijah was 35 when he died.
Jamie Snow took the witness stand and recalled paying cash to Cancun police in order to view photos of her husband’s body and to receive a report that revealed to her where his body was found. Once she returned to Texas, Jamie handed each of her girls a stuffed animal.
“I told them that their dad wasn’t coming home,” she said.
Jamie tearfully recounted her husband’s value to their family.
“We’ve lost so much,” she said.
Bearden asked Jamie what she wanted.
“What I want I’ll never have,“ Jamie told the jury, suggesting that precisely what happened to her husband cannot be known.
Elijah wandered and died outside the Royalton Chic property, the defendants’ attorneys argue. A gift card left in his wallet suggests that he was not robbed, the attorneys said.
“Just because a tragedy occurs doesn’t mean that the hotel they were staying at was legally at fault,” RCM Hotel attorney James Kuritzkes told the jury in the defendants’ opening statement.
Elijah appeared intoxicated near a hotel elevator bank, according to a Royalton Chic surveillance video recording played for the jury. He did not make his way to the hotel room where his wife was sleeping.
Elijah walked beyond the Royalton Chic premises to the property of the Sunset Royal Beach Hotel, Kuritzkes told the jury.
Kuritzkes said the evidence would show that Elijah pried a board from the window that he tried to get in feet-first and enter a room of showers. He could not get out of his position in the window and became trapped, the defendants’ attorney said.
Elijah’s death was caused by traumatic asphyxia, a Mexican pathologist found.
Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, a pathologist who was hired by the plaintiff, concluded that Elijah’s death was caused by positional asphyxia and that alcohol played a significant role. Barnard’s cause determination is similar to the opinion of the Mexican pathologist.
Barnard prepared a report that does not refer to the manner of death. On cross-examination, Barnard testified that he was comfortable rendering the opinion that the death’s manner was accidental or undetermined.
“I cannot, however, rule out that he was put there in an incapacitated state by other individuals,” Barnard wrote in his report. Barnard reviewed autopsy and scene photos and a translated original autopsy report.
Dr. Satish Chundru, a pathologist who was hired by the defendants, testified that there is no evidence to support the undetermined manner classification that Dr. Barnard cannot exclude. Bruises on Elijah’s body are consistent with injuries that were caused by the windowsill, Chundru said.
“All the evidence in this case supports an accident,” Chundru testified.
Judge Melody Wilkinson is presiding in the case, which Jamie Snow filed in 2022.
Attorney Darren Wolf also represents Jamie Snow. Attorney Mike Burke also represents the defendants.
The plaintiffs rested their case on Friday morning, and the defendants began their case.
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 3:59 PM.
