Larissa Rodriguez was, by all accounts, a teenager who had everything going for her. The 17-year-old from Weslaco, Texas was a varsity cheerleader, a tennis player, an honor student, and a beauty queen who had been accepted to nearly 20 colleges. She had plans to study law at the University of Texas at Austin. She had no known health problems and did not drink alcohol or use drugs. Then, on October 20, 2025, she died suddenly from a cardiac event.
The Hidalgo County Medical Examiner determined that her cause of death was cardiomyopathy, a serious disease of the heart muscle, caused by excessive caffeine consumption. No other substances were found in her system. Her family’s attorney, Benny Agosto Jr., said at a press conference: “There’s no alcohol, there’s no drugs, there’s no fentanyl. There’s no synthetic drugs. The only thing she had in her system was caffeine.”
