EVERETT — Betsy Alvarado finds it hard to focus on sweet memories of her two daughters when two months after their deaths she still has no answers.
All over her Everett home are photos of Adriana and Mariel Gil smiling as young children and teenagers. Around her neck, Alvarado wears a heart-shaped locket inscribed with, "Adriana and Mariel, forever in our hearts."
Adriana and Mariel, 17 and 16 respectively, were found dead on Dec. 11 with their father, Manuel Gil, inside the Renton apartment they shared.
Renton police said the girls appeared to have died on Dec. 5, while Gil likely died a day or so before the three bodies were found. There were no signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, no obvious indications of foul play, visible trauma or signs of a struggle, police have said.
The King County Medical Examiner's Office conducted autopsies in mid-December, but was unable to determine a clear cause or manner of death, prompting further laboratory testing. The results are still pending.
Detective Robert Onishi, who has worked with Renton police for 30 years, said he's never seen a case like this.
"We're down to things like toxicology," he said of efforts to determine a cause of death. "We don't have any clearer resolution than we had a month ago, or even a couple of months ago at this point."
The gap in days between estimated times of death for the sisters and their father leaves no doubt in Alvarado's mind that Gil, whom she ended a relationship with around 2007, had something to do with their daughters' deaths, she said.
Without answers
Neighbors had seen Gil packing items into a U-Haul a few weeks before Dec. 10, making Alvarado think he had left with the girls. But she had no way of knowing what was going on because her daughters and their father had cut off contact with other family members by then, she said.
The night before the girls and their father were found, Alvarado had asked police several times to go into the apartment, but said she felt that there was no real urgency about the way officers responded.
Police said they went to the apartment on Dec. 10, but it was locked. Officers did not go inside because they did not notice anything suspicious from the outside.
The next morning, after learning police had been there, the landlord went inside the apartment and found the bodies.
Alvarado said she felt frustrated and ignored after the deaths when her emails to police went unanswered for over a week several times.
"I feel like I have no trust with the police," she said. "I was ignored and I'm still being ignored."
Onishi said the department has been as responsive as it can be under the circumstances. He said he, too, is frustrated with not being able to provide concrete answers to the family. He doesn't see any way police can go beyond what they are doing now.
"There is not much to update the family on," he said.
Adriana had been living with her father for about four or five years and Mariel had moved in with them a year and a half ago. Alvarado's parenting plan with Gil only allowed him time with the girls every other weekend, but she says she felt powerless to seek to enforce it and did not have the means.
"If you don't have thousands of dollars to go out and hire a lawyer to enforce your parenting plan, then you're stuck," Alvarado said. "You're going in circles dealing with this. This is how it is for people that don't have money."
Concerning changes
Looking back, Alvarado said there were several red flags about the girls' behavior that several organizations and agencies missed.
The girls' school attendance was sporadic, but it's unclear whether the school could have intervened or if it flagged their absences, said Renton police Detective Tracie Jarratt, who is assigned to the case. The Renton School District declined to comment, saying that it will defer to police since the case is still open.
On Nov. 1, Gil told the human resources department at the moving company where he worked "he needed to make things right with his maker" before abruptly quitting, his ex-wife told Alvarado.
Alvarado said she called Child Protective Services in April or May to report her concerns that the girls may have been abused and were malnourished after each lost about 50 pounds.
The state Department of Children, Youth, and Families looked into the report, but the agency did not send a referral to police for a follow-up because their investigation concluded that "the situation did not meet the threshold for assessment," Jarratt said.
DCYF declined to comment on the case.
Alvarado said she believes Gil's extreme religious beliefs led to her daughters' growing distance from her. It was a gradual shift, she said, but the girls became malnourished and cut off contact with the outside world.
"People didn't want to touch it. Nobody wants to get in trouble for messing with somebody's religion, but now my kids are dead," Alvarado said.
Alvarado said her daughters were followers of the Hebrew Israelite faith while she suspects their father was following an extremist sect of the Black Hebrew Israelite faith that is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League. The extremist sects are known for their belief that white people are agents of Satan, Jewish people are false worshippers of God and that Black people are racially superior and are the chosen people, according to the ADL.
"They just withdrew a lot," Alvarado said. "They stopped finding joy in a lot of the stuff that they were into. Everything became worldly to them ... meaning it was wrong or meaningless."
Giving up hobbies
Ron Anderson, the girls' stepfather, remembers going to a play with Adriana and Mariel in which his youngest daughter was performing. As the room filled with laughter and applause, Adriana's facial expression remained stern, an unusual thing for the teen who would usually be loudly cheering her stepsister, he said.
"I just thought that was the weirdest thing," Anderson said.
Anderson had come into the girls' lives when they were about 3 years old, shortly after they moved to Washington from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Alvarado's parents, Chris and Irma Amundson, helped raise the girls for a few years when they were younger and remember Adriana as always taking on the role of leader with Mariel right beside her like a "sidekick."
They took the girls on several trips and vacations. Their favorite was taking the girls to Guatemala City, Guatemala, where Irma was born and raised, to meet family members and experience the culture and food.
But that was before the girls distanced themselves from the family, they said.
Mariel, who had a creative soul, gave up drawing because she felt she had sinned and had to atone for it, Alvarado said. She can't recall what exactly had pushed her daughter to give up something she loved, but it was clear her biological father approved of it.
"Parents don't do that for kids, no matter what they do," Anderson said. "That was painful to hear."
Adriana no longer played sports, not even basketball, which she loved and excelled at, Alvarado said.
The last time Alvarado spent time with the girls was in February 2021, when they went to a skating rink and then got pizza.
They had planned to go again, but then the girls canceled, telling Alvarado they couldn't be "involved in all that worldly stuff."
After that there was no more hanging out, Alvarado said, and the girls' responses become shorter until they only replied with Bible scriptures and then not at all.
The girls no longer left the apartment and they cut everyone out of their lives including their grandparents, who were "their favorite people," Alvarado said.
