(CP)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008

SELKIRK, Man.—The family of a Manitoba man who Mexican authorities claim died after falling off a 10th-floor balcony say the autopsy raises disturbing questions.
“They said that he just had trauma . . . to the back of the head,” Michelle Iwasiuk, the victim’s sister, told CTV Winnipeg.

“I can’t see how you can fall out of a 10-storey building and only have trauma to the back of your head.”
Josh Iwasiuk, 19, of Selkirk had been staying at a hotel in Puerto Vallarta with his older brother, Jerry, over the weekend when the deadly incident occurred.
Jerry Iwasiuk said he and Josh were partying Saturday afternoon, but that a security guard at their resort told the pair that Jerry was so drunk he’d have to return to his room.
Iwasiuk said he went to the room and fell asleep for 17 hours, waking with what he claimed was a headache that was different from a usual hangover.
Worse, he says, he couldn’t find his brother.
“I looked all over. Nobody would answer me. I could tell something was up just by the looks people were giving me,” Iwasiuk said.
Foreign Affairs officials in Canada say they are in contact with the Iwasiuk family, as well as with police in Mexico.
Iwasiuk’s body is still in Mexico, but Foreign Affairs said they are arranging to have the body shipped home to Manitoba later this week.
Jerry Iwasiuk says the railings on their hotel room balcony were chest-high, so he doesn’t see how Josh could have accidentally slipped off.
He also said he hasn’t been able to find out if his brother had been robbed, and he wonders whether he himself had been drugged, which would explain why he’d slept so long.
“People don’t normally sleep that long. It was the longest sleep I’d ever had,” Iwasiuk said.
In November, Chris Morin, 30, of Okotoks, Alta., fell to his death from a fourth-floor balcony in Cancun.
Authorities said they’d found illicit drugs in his system, but his travelling companions suspected that a dispute in a bar earlier in the evening may have been connected with his death.
Another Albertan, Jeff Toews, died earlier in 2006 in Cancun from what authorities said also was an apparent fall from a resort balcony. Toews’ family always has suspected the 34-year-old man was the victim of a horrific beating.
Other high-profile deaths that have befallen Canadians in Mexico include Dominic and Nancy Ianiero from Woodbridge, Ont., who died in February, 2006 after their throats were slashed in their Cancun hotel room.
Police have never found their killer.
And in January, 2006, Woodbridge teenager Adam DePrisco was an apparent hit-and-run victim in Acapulco, although his parents have speculated his death was not an accident.