A hotel guest has recalled seeing a QAnon-supporting surfer in northern Mexico the day before authorities say he murdered his two young children. The guest said he remembered Mr Coleman telling them: “You’ll see mommy soon”.
Matthew Coleman, 40, is charged with killing his two children, Kaleo, 2, and 10-month-old Roxy, with a spear gun on 9 August 2021 in Baja California, Mexico after becoming convinced they were infected with “serpent DNA”.
Authorities say Mr Coleman had been packing to go on holiday with his wife Abby and the children two days earlier when he suddenly drove off from their Santa Barbara home without her, and crossed the border into Mexico.
He spent two nights with the children at the City Express Hotel in Rosarito, just south of Tijuana.
Guest Malena Rivas told People the family stood out because they were “really good looking”.
“He was talking to them, smiling, and it was normal to me. He said, ‘You’ll see mommy soon’, or something like that, which is why I thought she was there with them, either at the pool or up in their room,” Ms Rivas told People.
The FBI says Mr Coleman left the hotel on the morning of 9 August and took the children to a nearby ranch, where he killed them and left their bodies.
In a recent letter to a friend from prison obtained by People, Mr Coleman wrote that he regretted becoming consumed with online conspiracy theories.
“With God’s help, I’m realising how far away I was from the Truth,” Mr Coleman wrote.
“I shouldn’t have spent so much time on these theories, and just focused on being a husband and a father.”
Mr Coleman told the friend from an undisclosed prison in California that he was beginning to think more clearly without access to blogs and websites that he had been following obsessively.
“There’s a lot to unpack, but I have to figure out what I really believe, but I don’t have access to information anymore, so I’m having to use my mind to figure things out,” he wrote, in the letter obtained by People.
In interviews with the FBI after his arrest, Mr Coleman told the FBI he thought he was Neo from The Matrix and that ‘Q’ – the supposed leader of the infamous conspiracy group – was “actually talking to him”.
Mr Coleman, 40, was arrested on 9 August at San Diego as he re-entered the United States.
He has pleaded not guilty to two charges of foreign first-degree murder.
