Dancing on Her Grave (5 page)

Cheerleader, College Graduate, Showgirl

After Debora’s death, the mystery of her life only deepened.

She and her older sister, Celeste, were both born in Puerto Rico, though the family moved to Baltimore in 1987, when Debbie was seven years old. Thirteen years later, in 2000, when her parents decided to move to Atlanta searching for new opportunities, Celeste moved away as well, leaving Debbie, then twenty years old, by herself in Baltimore. Celeste recalled, “I moved to Puerto Rico for about a year and a half, but then I returned to Atlanta and loved it [so I] stayed.” But Celeste wasn’t worried about her sister, who was in college at the time, and besides, they had a lot of friends there, so technically she wasn’t alone. Debbie’s parents later divorced when she
was twenty-three; it didn’t affect her much, though, and she understood they had to go their separate ways.

More than anything, Celeste remembered what a good-hearted person her little sister was. She said Debbie couldn’t stand seeing someone in need, and had to help them. “She was a generous girl,” Celeste said.

Her older sister recalls Debbie as a well-liked “social butterfly” who made friends everywhere she went. In school, Debbie was a very popular girl, but that didn’t stop her from getting good grades and wanting to succeed. Debbie attended the University of Baltimore, and then Towson University, also near Baltimore. She was a very dedicated and smart student. Celeste recalled, “She would just take more and more classes.”

Debbie ultimately received three degrees, one in international business, one in law, and one in marketing.

But she loved to dance.

Since Debbie was a little girl, she’d had an amazing talent for dance, and she loved the attention she got for performing for her family. “Even though she was never professionally trained to dance, she took every opportunity in school, extracurricular activities and asked anyone who knew how to dance, especially salsa and merengue, the Dominican dance, to show her some new moves,” her sister said. On our own newscast at Univision, Celeste reminisced in her English-accented Spanish about how her sister “was always practicing her dances. . . . She
started to take dancing lessons and became a professional dancer. She was in ballroom and Latin dance classes, and I remember her telling me that one day she was going to move to Vegas. I was very surprised!”

But Vegas seemed an inevitable progression for the young woman who, according to her sister, Celeste, “loved the limelight.” Before she was a professional dancer, Debbie had been a cheerleader at Old Mill High School in Millersville and then she’d successfully tried out for the Washington Redskins cheerleading squad, and there she was on camera, on a world stage.

“She was a good cheerleader in elementary and middle school and some high school,” Celeste remembered. “She was always winning competitions. She did not go straight from high school to Redskins, though. She tried out for the team after she got her degrees.” Debbie was with the Washington Redskins Cheerleaders in 2007 and 2008, a relatively easy commute for her, since Washington D.C. is only about a thirty-minute drive from Baltimore.

Being a cheerleader was glamorous work. (In fact, “Think glamorous!” their website encourages. “You may want to contact the hair salon for the Washington Redskins Cheerleaders to ask for advice on the perfect hairstyle for you.” And they even list the website for the salon.) But also, according to their website, the squad “is more dance-oriented than cheerleading and stunting,” and the dances emphasize jazz and hip-hop.

These dances were obviously right up Debbie’s alley. She easily made the squad, and loved her stint there.

On her Facebook page, Debbie wrote the following poem on October 21, 2009. She titled it “JUST DO IT.”

Too often we are scared.

Scared of what we might not be able to do.

Scared of what people might think if we tried.

We let our fears stand in the way of our hopes.

We say no when we want to say yes.

We sit quietly when we want to scream.

And we shout with the others,

When we should keep our mouths shut.

Why?

After all

We do only go around once.

There’s really no time to be afraid.

So stop.

Try something you’ve never tried.

Risk it.

Enter a triathlon.

Write a letter to the editor.

Demand a raise.

Call winners at the toughest court.

Throw away your television.

Bicycle across the United States.

Try bobsledding.

Try anything.

Speak out against the designated hitter.

Travel to a country where you don’t speak the language.

Patent something.

Call her.

You have nothing to lose

and everything

everything

everything to gain.

JUST DO IT.

Well, Debbie certainly didn’t seem to be afraid. She just did it—right?

Cheerleading was not a full-time job, however. In fact, the Redskins Cheerleaders website lists having another full- or part-time job, attending school full-time, or having a family among their minimum requirements. After her tenure as a cheerleader for the NFL team, Debbie “started taking dance class, and became a pro,” Celeste said. “She was in ballroom, Latin dance, you name it.” The sisters never talked about work, Celeste said. “I was so busy with raising my first son,” at the time (she later had another son as well), though she knew her sister was also working managing financial portfolios, and attending the university, first the University of Baltimore, and then nearby Towson University. According to her profile on
LinkedIn, a professional networking site, Debbie spent time as Senior Financial Analyst at Constellation Energy, Senior Manager of Financial Operations at Allegis Group, Financial Analyst II at Wells Fargo, and Junior Investment Analyst at Legg Mason.

In her post, she stated she had “roughly 9 years of Financial Analysis as well as Portfolio and Investment Analysis, Operations Management, Performance and Risk Analysis, and Business Strategy Management.” She added that she had “excellent Public Relations experience,” as well as a clear understanding of client relations. She stated she fully understood “the business cycle and flow of information, both financial and non-financial.” And that she also fully understood, and had a strong grasp of, “both the financial and accounting principles as well as the capital markets.” Her specialization was in multitasking with great efficiency and with strong interpersonal and communication skills. Flores-Narvaez considered that her success stemmed from her “ability to oversee multiple projects at once and build teams of ‘Winners’ to meet tight deadlines.”

She placed special emphasis on her “organizational skills,” which “enabled her to complete those projects efficiently and effectively.” She also highlighted her capacity to learn “new areas of knowledge” in order to meet any expectations, no matter how high, of any organization.

The young executive had certainly been busy with her
financial career. It makes one wonder, why would a young professional woman exchange three-piece suits and heels for sequins and feathers? Why would she abandon a prestigious, lucrative career to dance on the stages of Las Vegas?

Perhaps because even though she had good friends, and she was working and being a cheerleader for the Washington Redskins, the wide world of sports was not enough. Debora sought a larger stage.

Tennille Ball, a friend of Debbie’s who went to high school with her at Old Mill High School and later visited Debbie in Las Vegas in the summer of 2010, months before she went missing, also offered some insight.

Both young professional women had had lucrative jobs, but their hearts hadn’t been in the nine-to-five upward mobility grind. Tennille had left her job as a manager at MCI (media control interface, the global communications group) to become independent as a holistic massage therapist and caterer for holistic foods, while Debbie left her position as a senior financial analyst to go into dancing. “We both loved dancing, but she took it much further,” Tennille, an African American woman now in her thirties, remembered. “I did it for recreation and fun, but it was her life energy.” Tennille added that the two friends would go out dancing with other friends about three nights a week. Debbie never talked about work. “We both kind of escaped from our daily lives by going dancing,” Tennille
said. “We would all go out to clubs, not only in Maryland but in Virginia. Some clubs have Latin Night, and whenever that was, there we were!” Her friend laughed. She also commented that Debbie was “exceptionally intelligent.”

“If you have a passion for something, you can’t fight it,” clarified Debbie’s high school friend. “And Debbie’s not a behind-the-desk kind of girl.”

Therefore, when her then-boyfriend Jamile McGee decided to move to Las Vegas in 2009, Debbie elected to go with him. The two of them had gone to high school together, and he was a dancer, too, and had been a finalist in the
So You Think You Can Dance
competition. So Debbie then fully committed herself to her dream, to dance.

Her big sister was not thrilled when Debbie called to give her the news that she was moving to Vegas. Their mother was particularly upset about it, Celeste said.

“I was so mad at Debbie,” Celeste remembered. “I thought it was a terrible idea. She didn’t know anyone in that city. At least in Baltimore she had friends. Las Vegas is such a crazy city and I don’t know why, but I had a very bad feeling.” She didn’t want her little sister to move to such a crazy place. “In Sin City you get in trouble,” Celeste concluded. Obviously, her little sister had.

Celeste added, “When she told me she was going to move to Las Vegas, I knew she was serious, but at first I
was like, ‘nah, she’s going to change her mind.’ But she did it. She left her studies and her degrees behind and realized her dream: dance.”

Debbie lived in Las Vegas for two and a half years before she disappeared, and unfortunately, Celeste was never able to afford to visit until that December 2010. “Her life was radically different in Vegas,” Celeste conceded. A sister knows. “She didn’t have to tell us, we knew.” She also knew without being told about Debbie’s volatile relationships. “Well, when she loved, she loved all the way, no holds barred,” Celeste said. “Of course, they fought; couples do not get perfectly along all of the time. She was a firecracker, very explosive at times. But she did it because she studied hard, played hard, and loved hard.”

Debbie was apparently working hard, and loving hard, in Las Vegas. But Celeste did not know many details about who her love interests were after Debbie split from Jamile.

“I knew she was with somebody in Vegas, but I didn’t know who he was,” said her older sister. “I have children and I work during the day, and there are two hours difference between us,” Celeste said, referring to the time difference between Las Vegas and Atlanta. “We’d talk about my kids and our family, and that was it. Sometimes I felt that she was sad and having problems, and I knew it was on account of some relationship, but I wasn’t going to push her if she didn’t want to talk.”

It was only later, after Celeste arrived in Las Vegas to search for her missing sister, that she found out from Debbie’s dancer friend, Mia Guerrero, that her sister had been dating another dancer: Jason “Blu” Griffith.

Mia described Griffith as “quite shy” and rather “nondescript.” But Jason Griffith is a good-looking African American male, with strong facial features, intense, deep-set brown eyes, and a killer body, with defined muscles in his legs and arms, and the proverbial six-pack abs; he stands five feet nine inches tall and weighs a lean 165 pounds, which is all muscle. It is easy to see why women were attracted to him. Little did Celeste know just how much her little sister was attracted to the seemingly “nondescript,” unassuming young dancer.

As close as the two sisters were, Celeste admitted that Debbie never confided in her about any problems the couple might’ve been having.

“My sister would just say, ‘I’m sad today,’ or ‘We’re not getting along today. My boyfriend and I are having problems.’ Sometimes she would tell me she wanted to come home or visit, that she needed a break. But she never filled me in on the details. And she never came home.”

When asked about her sister’s previous boyfriend, Jamile McGee, the one Debbie initially followed to Vegas, Celeste didn’t know much, either. She suggested that I try looking him up online, which I did, and I even reached
out to him on Facebook, where he’d posted a spectacular picture of himself doing one of his flashy dance moves.

He responded to an interview request via a lengthy message on Facebook, in which he detailed Debora’s behavior toward him and how it affected his life.

But after sending it, he asked that the message not be reproduced. He did not “feel comfortable” talking about his ex, he said, adding that it was a shame what happened to her. His Facebook page is no longer online.

Jamile McGee was also a professional dancer, mainly of hip-hop. He was featured in music videos and television reality shows. But according to a story published in the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
on December 23, 2010, Debora Flores-Narvaez filed a lawsuit against Jamile McGee, whom she accused of beating her, in August 2009. According to court documents, she alleged that she had suffered scarring as a result of a June 2009 assault by McGee in which she alleged that he’d kicked her stomach, dragged her from her car, and held her “hostage in his apartment while continuing to beat her.”