WELLINGTON, Unusual Zealand — The family of a Tennessee pharmacist who died on her honeymoon in Fiji determined to cremate her within the South Pacific nation as a substitute of bring her dwelling because her physique was once badly damaged, a lawyer representing the family said Thursday.
Christe Chen, 36, died earlier this month on the uncommon Turtle Island resort. Her husband Bradley Robert Dawson, 38, has been charged alongside with her extinguish and made his first look Wednesday at Fiji’s Lautoka High Court docket.
The case has been adjourned unless next month and Dawson, who remains in jail, has now not but entered a plea. If chanced on guilty, he could well perhaps also face a sentence of life imprisonment.
Criminal authentic Ronald Gordon, who is representing Chen’s family, said Chen’s oldsters traveled to Fiji after their daughter’s death however didn’t embalm her physique and procedure shut her to the U.S. as they’d hoped. As a replacement, they took dwelling her ashes.
Gordon said the newlyweds, who were based mostly in Memphis, had arrived in Fiji on July 7 for their honeymoon on the resort, which is on a 500-acre island and restricted to 14 couples at a time.
Gordon said the couple were heard arguing over dinner on July 8, and following an incident in their room, Dawson fled on a kayak to one other island, taking his pockets however now not his cell phone or GPS sight.
It wasn’t unless the next afternoon, after the couple had overlooked breakfast and lunch, that crew chanced on Chen’s physique, Gordon said. He said she had extra than one blunt trauma wounds to her head.
Dawson was once chanced on by police about 36 hours later, Gordon said. He said Dawson could well perhaps even include making an try to salvage to Fiji’s predominant island however caught out on the distant island inhabited easiest by Indigenous other folks that had alerted others to Dawson’s presence.
Dawson’s lawyer Iqbal Khan said that from what he is aware of to this level, he doesn’t perceive the system of extinguish. He said investigators haven’t but launched to him the entire records within the case, collectively with the post-mortem tale, however that what took place could well perhaps also were an accident.
Khan said Dawson left the resort because “he disturbed, he was once unnerved.” He said Dawson was once distressed at losing his wife and had been slowly recovering.
NBC News reported Dawson labored as an records abilities specialist for a nonprofit group, Childhood Villages, whereas Chen had labored as a pastry chef sooner than returning to varsity to radically change a pharmacist, and had labored in that capacity at a Kroger grocery store in Memphis.
The University of Tennessee Effectively being Science Heart College of Pharmacy final 300 and sixty five days congratulated Chen on Fb for a success an award, the Wolters Kluwer Medical Drug Recordsdata Award of Excellence in Medical Conversation.