Nearly five years after a Thanksgiving trip to Cancún ended with Sativa Transue dead in a hotel room, a Mexican court has handed down a major sentence against the U.S. man who traveled with her. The case began with frantic messages, a consular call no family wants to receive, and a long legal process that her relatives followed from Washington and Mexico. The latest ruling closes one part of the case, though the legal fight may not be over.
A Cancún vacation ended in death, now he gets 50 years
A U.S. citizen has been sentenced to 50 years in prison in Mexico for the femicide of Sativa Nichelle Transue, a 26-year-old woman from Washington state who was killed during a Thanksgiving trip to Cancún in 2021.
Taylor Keith Duran Allen received the sentence after a long criminal case in Quintana Roo. State Attorney General Raciel López Salazar disclosed the sentence during a press conference, closing one of the more closely watched tourist-zone homicide cases in recent years.
A sentence after nearly five years
Transue and Allen had traveled to Cancún over the Thanksgiving holiday in November 2021. They stayed at the All Ritmo Resort in Puerto Juárez, in Cancún’s Supermanzana 85, where investigators later placed the crime.
Authorities said Transue was found dead in the hotel room the couple shared. The autopsy cited strangulation and multiple contusions, with signs that she had tried to defend herself.
Her relatives had followed the Mexican case for years, sometimes from inside the courtroom and sometimes from the United States. When the trial began in April, Transue’s mother traveled to Cancún to attend the proceedings. As the case dragged on, other family members followed online when they could no longer take time off work.
Transue’s sister, Mykayla Bolieu, said the conviction brought some measure of justice, but “it didn’t bring her back.” She described her sister as “the brightest light” in Washington coverage of the sentencing.
The first calls home
The case first became public after Transue’s family said they were contacted by the U.S. Consulate in Mexico. Bolieu later said her mother received the call that Transue had been found dead in her Cancún hotel room.
Before that call, family members said, Transue had sent messages about a fight with Allen and needing stitches. Her sister said friends became worried and contacted authorities.
“I have never been more heartbroken,” Bolieu said in an early interview after Transue’s death.
Allen was arrested in Cancún after the killing and remained in Mexico as the criminal case moved forward. The family has said it expects him to appeal the sentence.
A case watched on both sides of the border
The killing drew attention in Mexico and the United States because of where it happened, the nationality of both people involved, and the charge of femicide, a crime Mexico treats separately from homicide when prosecutors argue a woman was killed because of gender-based violence.
A U.S. State Department official said early in the case that the agency was monitoring the local investigation and providing consular assistance to the family. “The safety and welfare of U.S. citizens abroad is the highest priority,” the official said in coverage of the case at the time.
The sentence also places the case among several Quintana Roo deaths that have drawn scrutiny beyond Mexico. In 2021, the killing of Victoria Salazar in Tulum led prosecutors to charge four municipal police officers with femicide after she died while being restrained by police, a case Vallarta Daily covered in the Tulum femicide investigation.
Transue was from Cheney, Washington, and graduated from Eastern Washington University with a degree in exercise science. Family and friends described her as kind, joyful, and close to the people around her.
The 50-year sentence means Allen would remain in a Mexican prison for decades unless a higher court changes the ruling.
