Christy Giles' mother vows to get justice as she reveals model's final hours: ‘I think they did sexual things to my daughter’
Exclusive: As she searches for answers, Dusty Leslie Giles tells Jade Bremner there is no way her daughter would have spent up to 12 hours with unknown men, or taken heroin voluntarily
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Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola were both dumped outside separate California hospitals on Sunday evening, after attending a party at Soho House in Los Angeles and leaving with a group of men the previous night.
Twenty-four-year-old model Ms Giles was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, while her friend Ms Cabrales-Arzola, a 26-year-old Mexican architect designer, is currently in a critical condition and in a coma.
Ms Giles’ husband, Jan Cilliers, told media that his wife was dumped by three masked men, who drove away in a car with no number plates. The car and the men and were allegedly seen two hours later dropping Ms Cabrales-Arzola by the side of the road outside another hospital.
“Marcela’s toxicology report came back, and I guess they found heroin in her system, which is nothing that either of those girls would ever do, not voluntarily,” he told ABC7.
Ms Giles’s mother, Dusty Leslie Giles, has offered her full account of the events of last weekend to The Independent, in a bid to get justice for her daughter.
She explained how her son-in-law was able to track the movements of her daughter's phone via a location-sharing device, which the pair had set up for safety reasons. He knew that she was at an address in West Hollywood following the Soho House party and knows she was dropped at the Southern California Hospital in Culver City some 10-12 hours later. He also has access to all her text messages from the night.
“My son-in-law has the mirror images of her text messages. My daughter got a brand new phone, and her old phone was still active and at home, it’s backed up to iCloud, so you can see the text messages,” explained Ms Giles. “She also has alerts on received text messages, so you can see when she has read a text.”
The last text message her daughter Christy sent was at 5.48am. “My daughter texted Hilda ‘let’s get out of here’ with a big wide eyed emoji – like I am scared, we need to leave. Hilda agreed and said ‘I’m getting an Uber’.
“We know that Hilda did order an Uber, we know that approximately 5-10 minutes later an Uber arrived. The Uber waited. The Uber left.
“We knew their location because Share my iPhone gives specifics.
“The next text message that was sent to her phone was from a male friend who was at the Soho House party with them, which said ‘where are y’all at?’ My daughter never opened it, never read it.”
Ms Giles got the news that her daughter was at the hospital when her son-in-law, who was in San Fransisco for the weekend, was desperately trying to reach his wife all day following the party, and he noticed that the location of her phone had moved from West Hollywood to the Culver City hospital.
“He then immediately called the Culver City hospital. All they would do was confirm she was a patient in their emergency room. He then immediately called me. I’m a registered nurse. I spoke to them – I knew what they needed,” said Ms Giles.
“They told me that ‘this was not normal for them, and that three unidentified men had dropped her lifeless body on the sidewalk’ and when her husband called they thought it could be one of them calling back and they weren’t giving any information out. They told me that they had dropped my daughter off and she had passed. They were unable to revive her. She was dead on arrival. They told me ‘it was a police matter’. Her husband was already at the airport when he called me, trying to get a flight back to LA.
“Then he got the call that the girl that my daughter had been with all night had been dropped off at a second hospital location, by three bandana-masked men who had removed the licence plates from their vehicle prior to dropping these women off. This was two hours apart at two separate hospitals, same vehicle, same men.
“The only difference was they were able to revive her heart, but her brain had suffered extreme hypoxia, and severe trauma. She is in a coma, which means she is unresponsive, her heart is beating but there is no level of consciousness. She’s not moving, she’s not doing anything voluntarily.”
As Ms Cabrales-Arzola was still alive, her toxicology results are quicker, explained Ms Giles. “When hers came back it contained a trace amount of amphetamine and a trace amount of cocaine. When more results came in it showed she had heroin in her system,” she said. “For my daughter, we are waiting for an autopsy to be done. Everything at this point is hypothetical, with the assumption that what they found in Hilda’s toxicology report is going to match my daughter’s. We don’t know.”
Ms Giles explained that a homicide detective took over the case when they realised two girls were involved, and said three men were taken in for questioning and they are claiming what happened was an accidental overdose. “It went from being investigated as a possible homicide to a possible overdose,” she said.
Ms Giles is adamant her daughter would have never touched heroin. “These men had my daughter’s body for over 10-12 hours. There’s no way my daughter would have spent 10-12 hours with unknown men,” she said, speculating that something more sinister was at play.
“I think that once they knew that [Christy and Hilda] had called an Uber and started to leave they subdued them, the only way to subdue my daughter would be to drug her or tie her up against her will. That’s the only way they would have kept my daughter ...
“I believe they would have to give them something to keep them docile and continue doing whatever they were doing. I think they did sexual things to my daughter’s body and to Hilda. They had plenty of time to clean her up and drop her lifeless body at the hospital.”
Christy Giles was the daughter of a military sergeant, an Iraqi veteran, who taught his children how to defend themselves. “My daughter was scrappy, she would have fought,” said Ms Giles, explaining that her father taught her how to “kill somebody with a ballpoint pen” if she needed to.
“The last thing my daughter did of her own free will was text ‘let’s get out of here’, she didn’t text or post anything on Instagram they did nothing.”
Ms Giles has numerous questions for the police, and hopes they will thoroughly investigate the suspicious circumstances around her daughter’s death. “If it was a voluntary overdose, why didn’t they call 911? Why did they wait until my daughter was a lifeless body and dump her at an emergency room? Why did you remove your licence plate [before taking the girls to hospital]? Why did you obscure your faces? Why did you dump another body after two additional hours? Why did you take her to a completely different hospital? Why didn’t you drop both girls at the hospital?”
Ms Giles last spoke to her daughter on Friday (12 November) – “she was coming home on 22 November for Thanksgiving,” said her mother. “My daughter was happily married, they wanted children. They live in Marina Del Rey on the beach and they were going to move to the suburbs so they could have a yard and children. My daughter was grounded, she wasn’t some flighty 20-year-old party girl. She’s been a professional model since she was 14-years-old. She’s lived in Los Angeles since she was 18-years-old, she’s lived in London, Miami, Peru, she’s been to Mexico. She was her grandmother’s best friend, a daddy’s girl, she has two sisters.”
Ms Giles is going to LA on Sunday for a memorial service. She hopes to find more answers when she is there. “The police told me that they will meet with me face to face, they said they would call me, but nobody has called me.”
A GoFundMe page has been set up in Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola’s honour to fund a private investigation and to pay for funeral costs