A four-month-old girl has been orphaned after her parents were among five people who died at a party.
Aria Marquez was found near the bodies of her mother and father Sam Marquez, 24, and Karina Rodriguez, 28, and two other women and a man.
They had taken her to the party in Colorado and were discovered the following day. It is believed they had taken fentanyl-laced cocaine.
Sam’s sister Cora was the only survivor and is in hospital recovering, but does not remember what happened.
A neighbor, Ian Scott, described Cora as ‘high as a kite’ while holding Aria in her arms outside the unit on Sunday.
A police officer said that Aria is in good health and doing well.
Karina is also survived by an older son, Josiah, from a past relationship, who appears in various family pictures.
Scott looked inside the apartment to find Sam, Karina, Humberto Arroyo and two women who have not been identified but are apparently friends of Karina. Investigators found lines of a drug spread out inside the unit.
District attorney Brian Mason said: ‘It appears they ingested fentanyl. Fentanyl is not typically something that a user would ingest in a line. So, I think they probably thought they were taking cocaine.’
Cora apparently told Scott she tried to revive one of her friends with an injection, but that Sam’s stepsister arrived at the apartment to find five adults dead and the infant quiet.
‘The baby wasn’t crying at all, so she goes in the room – she must have heard Salina – and the baby started crying,’ Sam’s father Dan Marquez told ABC 7. ‘So, I think maybe there was an angel or somebody there taking care of her.’
