Mark Williams-Thomas, the British private investigator hired by the family of Ivana Smit, has released his preliminary findings into the death of the teen model, including details of the Dutch pathologist’s report.
The conclusions are rather damning to those who were present at the time of Smit’s death. The report alleges that her injuries are consistent with those of someone who had been knocked out before she fell from the 20th-floor balcony.
Initial Malaysian police and postmortem reports had concluded that “sudden death” was the cause of the fatality, alluding to the model’s state of intoxication. Her family hotly contested this, and created a media maelstrom after her father declared that upon seeing his daughter’s dead body, bruises had been clearly visible, including marks he identified as “finger-shaped.”
Now, Williams-Thomas is confirming that she indeed received a head injury before she fell, saying that while it was not significant enough to cause her death, it would have rendered her unconscious.
The pathologist elaborated that the lack of blood at the scene when she died adds further credence to the conclusion that the teenager was already dead when her body fell 14 stories onto a 6th-floor landing below.
Bruising on her arms are consistent with having been grabbed roughly before, or shortly after, she died.
Ecstasy levels in her blood at the time of death were “high enough to cause her death alone.”
In conclusion, though possible, it is highly improbable that she fell over the balcony, taking into consideration all of the injuries sustained before her death, he said.
As for the initial police findings pointing to “sudden death,” a term often used in suicide cases, Williams-Thomas states that this is unlikely, given witness statements, CCTV footage, and her behavior and communications shortly before her death.
Smit had gone back to the apartment of an American man, Alexander Johnson, and his Kazakh wife Luna, in the early hours of the morning on Dec. 7.
Johnson’s LinkedIn account reveals a litany of business endeavors, from selling insurance, to designing jeans, to his latest effort, Everus, a nebulous cryptocurrency commerce eco-system that our feeble minds can’t seem to make sense of.
A New York Post story claimed that the couple were well-known swingers, often inviting others to participate in their sexual antics.
Details of Ivana’s final hours before her death have emerged piecemeal over the past months, with Williams-Thomas’ most recent report confirming that the teen was carried to a lift in a KL-club by Johnson at 5:22am, a fact that first came to light when CCTV footage of the incident emerged in early February.
At 6:45am, Ivana rang her boyfriend from the couple’s apartment. Shortly thereafter, Luna rang Ivana’s boyfriend again and spoke with him. This was unusual, as the boyfriend had never spoken to either Luna or her husband before.
Thirty minutes later, Ivana went online on one of her two phones, and at 7:24am, she sent a selfie to her boyfriend of herself and Luna. She captioned it “I’m still chilling at my chicks (sic) place. I love you.”
At 9:30am, the occupant of the unit directly below the couple stated that they stepped out onto their balcony. They stated that at the time, there was no body visibly below, nor had she fallen while they were outside.
Sometime between 7:24am to shortly before the police were called at 2:45pm, Ivana sustained a head injury.
Williams-Thomas, a former police investigator-turned- journalist, has stated that until the questions regarding her death are satisfactorily answered, her death should be treated as homicide.
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