A young Edmonton man who just celebrated his 18th birthday is clinging to life in a Dominican Republic hospital after being brutally attacked while on vacation at a nearby resort, his mother says.
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Chase Delorme-Rowan, who goes to St. Joseph Catholic High School, suffered critical head injuries that required doctors to remove part of his skull, his mother Cindy Rowan told Postmedia on Saturday. She said her son is in a coma and not considered stable enough to be medevaced back to Canada.
“I have no idea how my son is going to come out of this. We still don’t know, Is he going to be able to talk, able to move? We have no idea yet,” Rowan said. “We don’t know how long his brain was without oxygen.”
Dominican authorities have arrested a male suspect in the attack, in which Delorme-Rowan was allegedly body slammed onto his head early Wednesday at a resort bar.
The victim’s mother said she and other members of her family briefly interacted with the suspect — another vacationer — at the Punta Cana resort days beforehand, when he told them he was a fellow Canadian from Nova Scotia. She said there is so far no explanation for what happened.
“It’s been a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.”
Chase turned 18 on Jan. 4.
Rowan said she and her husband saved up all year to take their Castle Downs family, including Chase and his two older brothers, to Punta Cana for a week to celebrate the milestone.
They arrived on Jan. 9, and the holiday went well for the first few days, with the family eating well, going on excursions and playing in the ocean.
Then late Tuesday, Chase and his brothers decided to go together to a resort bar around 10:30 p.m.
Rowan said she was awoken at around 12:45 a.m. by a phone call from her other sons, who indicated that something had happened to Chase but weren’t making much sense beyond that.
She said she advised her sons to bring Chase back to the room, thinking that he maybe had too many drinks. The next phone call, 15 minutes later, was much more disturbing, as Rowan was told an ambulance was on the way to the scene, and she could hear the sounds of screaming and panic through the phone.
Rowan said she then raced across the resort to the bar, arriving around the same time the ambulance did.
‘What the heck happened?’
“I see my son with a bunch of people around him, one holding his head, and he has (bloody) foam coming out of his mouth and he is seizing. And I’m lost. I’m like, ‘What the heck happened?’ ”
She said Chase continued seizing in the ambulance before arriving at the hospital, where staff refused to treat him for 3 1/2 hours until the family’s medical insurance had been verified.
“Until that was in place, they wouldn’t touch him.”
With his family begging staff to do something, Chase was eventually given a CT scan and X-rays. Hospital staff told Rowan her son’s skull was cracked “from the front of his forehead to the back of his neck.”
A couple of hours later, a neurosurgeon arrived to operate. A blood clot the size of a grapefruit was taken from Chase’s head, and part of his skull had to be removed due to severe swelling of the brain, his mother said.
The next three days were touch and go, with Chase developing a fever and continuing to bleed and swell. Finally, on Friday, the swelling and bleeding stopped.
“He is making small steps every day now. The doctors are pretty amazed,” Rowan said, before adding that Chase’s brain function can’t be tested until he is considered more stable.
Rowan, a letter carrier for Canada Post, said her husband and two older sons have travelled back to Edmonton, but she has remained in the Dominican Republic with her mother — and both will stay until Chase is ready to be transported to a Canadian hospital.
She said the resort gave her a discount to stay for another week and free daily rides to the hospital, but after that, she and her mother must move to a short-term rental apartment near the hospital. Costs are adding up, including fees for a local lawyer, which is why Rowan created a GoFundMe campaign to help. As of Saturday afternoon, the campaign had raised over $9,500.
At this point, doctors can’t give Rowan a timeline on her son’s recovery.
Suspect arrested at resort
The man who allegedly assaulted Chase left the scene right after the incident. Resort security was able to identify a suspect thanks to reports from their own officers on duty that night and other witness statements, Rowan said. The suspect was arrested the next day while trying to check out of the resort early, she said.
“The whole resort was sent a picture of him. They beefed up security everywhere — the beaches, at the front, just everywhere, and they were looking for him.”
Rowan said neither of her older sons witnessed what happened to their brother in the moment but got the story from other bar attendees that night.
“They heard from other people. I guess this guy in his 30s came up to my son and was grabbing his shirt and tussling with him. And all of a sudden, I guess he picked him up and body-slammed his head into the ground,” she said.
“And I’m thinking, ‘Are you freaking kidding me?’ Why? My son is the nicest kid ever. He’s happy-go-lucky. He’s probably about 100 pounds soaking wet.”
Rowan said that when she saw the picture of the suspect, she remembered talking to him a couple of days beforehand, when he told her he was from Nova Scotia. She remembered he had distinctive tattoos.
As yet, it is still unclear what charges the suspect faces, Rowan said. She said she is scheduled to go to Dominican court on Monday to give testimony.
“I just want to know why. Everybody wants to know why.”
Still, her main thoughts are focused on the recovery of her son, and the hope that he can eventually get back to his life in Edmonton.
“He loves animals. He’s got lots of friends at school, likes to draw, listen to music. He is a really, really good photographer and is hoping to get into some kind of journalism with that. He’s just a happy kid,” Rowan said.
Kyle Stephen Denny is the name of the accused, according to a copy of a police report Rowan sent to Postmedia.
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