RENTON, Wash. — “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense for two girls to be sitting next to each other and both of them die,” Ron Anderson said.
It’s been nearly seven months of pain for Anderson and Betsy Alvarado
“It just doesn’t make sense to me by the way that they died,” Alvarado said.
Last December, their two daughters, 17-year-old Adriana and 16-year-old Mariel Gil, were found dead along with their biological father Manuel Gil inside a Renton duplex.
The girls were living with Gil and all three bodies were found by the landlord who went to check on the unit.
Now Renton police say all three were starved to death and that Manuel took his own life.
“Because the father died considerably after the two girls did, the medical examiner conclusion is that the matter of deaths is a suicide," Renton Police Department detective Robert Onishi said.
But as for Adriana and Mariel, Renton police say the medical examiner can’t determine the manner of their death.
That’s something that Alvarado says she just can’t accept.
“That whole ordeal has been horrible because undetermined doesn’t really... it doesn’t do anything for this,” Alvarado said.
The couple feels the sisters weren’t eating based on what they’re calling extreme religious beliefs of their father when it came to fasting.
“They were scared to burn in hell," Alvarado said. "They felt that they needed to do this."
We asked the Renton Police Department if there was a connection to them starving and Manuel Gil’s religious views.
“There were a lot of references to a scripture into religion there," Onishi said. "I know there were some hand-written mentions of that. I don’t recall at this point what the details of those were."
After waiting for nearly seven months, Anderson and Alvarado worry they’ll never get the answers they’ve been looking for.