By Wendy Anders

Five university students were found stabbed to death this morning, and another was still alive but with deep wounds in her neck, in the middle class neighborhood of La Victoria, Liberia in the northern Costa Rican province of Guanacaste.

The students apparently were renting a 3-bedroom apartment located behind a house on the densely populated street, according to police. However, evidently nobody near the crime scene heard calls for help. Police are still determining more about the deceased – where they are from, and where they were studying.

Three of the five dead, three women and one man all in their 20s, were apparently found with their hands and feet bound with strips of fabric in the same room. The one who survived, and who is undergoing surgery in a hospital in Liberia, Guanacaste had moved out of the room to try to seek help.

Costa Rican police received a call via 9-1-1 at 8:30 this morning from a neighbor who observed the bloody scene from the doorway of the apartment.

No liquor, drugs or weapons were found at the scene of the crime in preliminary police reports provided by the judicial investigative police (OIJ) late Thursday morning. Police did say that the killer used a knife to take the youth’s lives.

Reports from Noticias Columbia say the victims were not students from the Liberia branch of the National University, as some initial reports had stated, and that the dead included 4 women and 1 man, not 3 women and 2 men as the police reported.

Noticias Columbia lists the following on their Facebook page as the slain youth: Yoseth Briones Solís (male, i.d. 5-400-269), Dayana Martínez Romero (female, i.d. 2-730-659), Stephanie Hernández García (female, i.d. 1-1493-884), Angie Serrano Mendoza (female), and Ingrid Méndez (female).

Neighbors who spoke with police said the students are from Upala and had been living in the apartment for about six months, according to the Costa Rican daily El Diario Extra.

According to a Facebook update by Waldivision Internacional, “One of the young women killed in Liberia (Costa Rica) sent an audio asking for help to a neighbor. ‘Sir, you’re not going to hurt us …’, she said to the apparent aggressor. The audio was recorded from the victim’s cell phone and sent as a message to a neighbor.”

The recording that was apparently sent at 2:00 a.m. this morning was collected by police as evidence.

This is the first mass murder of 2017, and a tragic start to the New Year in Costa Rica which is battling growing crime, much of it related to narcotraffic.

Police have not yet identified motives in the crime. An interdisciplinary criminal investigation team including forensic experts was sent from San José via helicopter to Liberia this morning to study the crime scene, block off roads, and begin an intensive investigation to find the killers, said Walter Espinoza, OIJ Director in a public statement.