Super Bowl LIX reporter death: Police open new investigation after details emerge about suspect

One of the more harrowing stories pertaining to last week’s Super Bowl LIX festivities in New Orleans involved the arrest of Louisiana woman Danette Colbert in connection to the death of a Kansas City Telemundo reporter, 27-year-old Adan Manzano.

Manzano was in New Orleans to cover Super Bowl LIX between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. Kenner police chief Keith Conley revealed earlier that Colbert was arrested after being captured on surveillance entering Manzano’s hotel room at 4:35 a.m. Wednesday.

Additionally, detectives said that the credit card Manzano used to check into the Comfort Suites wasn’t on his body or in the hotel room, according to a report from David K. Li of NBC News. Kenner police said that Colbert used Manzano’s credit card “at several stores in the New Orleans area.”

Now, added information has come to light on the matter, as previous victims of Colbert are coming forward, alleging that she left them for dead in similar plots years ago, according to TMZ Sports.

“Since Colbert was arrested and charged with robbery in connection to the Manzano case, several of her alleged victims have come forward to tell police their story,” the Kenner Police Department relayed to TMZ Sports.

It backs up the earlier revelation from the KPD, which stated that Colbert has a history of drugging men and “fraudulent use of credit and debit cards.” In 2022 in Nevada, she was “charged with introducing a substance, a foreign substance” into a victim, “and the other one was in Jefferson Parish, I believe it was two years ago.”

One of Colbert’s prior victims was David Butler, a 52-year-old who met Colbert at a French Quarter bar in New Orleans in November 2021, NBC News reported.

Butler said Colbert and another woman approached him and offered him a cocktail, and started to feel disoriented not long afterwards, per TMZ Sports. He needed help getting back home: “She ushered me into some kind of black Suburban that was literally right there,” he told NBC News, via TMZ Sports. “And that’s the last thing I remember that night.”

Afterwards, “A property manager found Butler passed out on the floor and shook him awake, with the victim finding his phone and wallet gone and his credit cards used to make thousand-dollar charges at Best Buy and Walmart,” TMZ Sports reported. “More than $80,000 that Butler stashed away in a cryptocurrency account for retirement was also gone, he said.”

Since, Butler has claimed to keep tabs on Colbert, and while she’s run into trouble with the law, she’s never faced jail time. If she was given a harsher sentence for crimes like computer fraud, theft, and illegal transmission of monetary funds, Butler believes Manzano would be alive today.

“Had the court acted decisively by incarcerating Ms. Colbert or enforcing stricter conditions for her release, it is possible Mr. Manzano would still be alive today,” Butler told NBC News, via TMZ Sports. “The minimal fines and lack of meaningful incarceration for crimes that could have led to serious injury or loss of life are, quite frankly, an insult to public safety and the justice system.”

Adan Manzano attended Kansas State after relocating to Topeka in 2018 from his hometown of Mexico City. This year’s Super Bowl was his third covering the Chiefs for KGKC. He also served as a sideline reporter for Tico Sports’ Spanish broadcast and did play-by-play for the NWSL’s KC Current. During his career, he received multiple awards from the Kansas Association of Broadcasters in 2024.

— On3’s Nick Geddes contributed to this article.