Family seeks answers after loved one killed abroad

EAGLE POINT, Ore. — “It’s a big, huge spider web of lies and deception… and we’re all trying to put it together,” said Debanee MacPherson-Udall, the victim’s sister.

Putting the pieces together… that’s all MacPherson-Udall and her family says they’ve been trying to do since her brother, Casey Pomeroy’s, life was cut short in December of 2018.

He was 37 years old.

“We knew that something was bad with my brother,” she said.

The Eagle Point native moved to California in 2004 to work as an actor and producer.

That’s also where he met his wife, Barbara.

The two were married 6 years before trading in the Hollywood lights for a much quieter life thousands of miles away on the Eastern Caribbean island of Anguilla.

“It was actually a surprise that he wanted to go to medical school, it really wasn’t a dream of his,” said MacPherson-Udall. “But we were excited for him, we were all excited for him because this was something spectacular he was doing with his life.”

They were living in the district of Island Harbor, just a few miles away from the St. James School of Medicine where Pomeroy was attending school.

“He loved it over there it was beautiful. They were living in paradise,” she said.

Four months later, tragedy struck.

“We were able to communicate with his wife and she had told us it was an accident,” she said.

Debanee says her sister-in-law told them two couples were visiting them to ring in 2019.

“They were out to dinner. They came home and my brother’s friend passed out and began having seizures,”  she said. “And then my brother began having seizures.”

Her sister-in-law says they called emergency services, but it was already too late.

“The friend had passed away and my brother apparently passed away at the hospital,” said MacPherson-Udall.

At first, the family didn’t ask too many questions.

“Stories started to come out. Stories started to change,” she said. “When they were there on the island they had them cremated right away and we weren’t in agreement about that.”

After Debanee claims police wouldn’t provide her information on her brother’s death, she says the trail went cold.

“We just want to know what happened. We want the truth of what happened,” she said.

Months later, she says the family got a hold of Pomeroy’s death certificate.

“Pulmonary edema, cardiac toxicity, cardia ischemia, hypothermia, and seizures,” she said. “The medical professional we had read the death certificate [and] told us it goes along the lines that he was poisoned.”

But that wasn’t the family’s only surprise.

Debanee had expected her brother’s friend to have died the same way.

“The cause of death for him was asphyxiation, strangulation both ligature and manual, multiple blunt force traumas, and seizures,” she said.

Pomeroy’s family believes he was murdered.

“We need that closure because we just need to heal,” she said. “We just need to be able to heal.”

Police in Anguilla are still investigating.

The family says they are working with a private investigator, T.J. Ward, who works on high profile cases across the country.

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