How Brothers’ ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to Mexican Paradise Turned Deadly

It took a chance meeting, a beach photograph, and a couple of beers for Callum Robinson to hear about San Diego photographer Randy Dible’s “sacred” Mexican surfing spot.

The hulking 6-foot-4-inch Australian with shoulder-length brown curly hair stopped by Dible’s photography booth near Ocean Beach on April 5, where they got chatting over a shot of a local surf break. Dible remembers a “kung-fu style grip of a handshake” and a conversation that parlayed into a hangout at Callum’s house the next day to drop off the print.

Over cans of beer, the Perth native who had moved stateside a decade prior for a successful lacrosse career, told Dible about his upcoming birthday trip with his brother, Jake—a doctor visiting from back home—and some friends.

The 33rd birthday vacation would involve some of the former lacrosse pro’s favorite things: a weekend at Coachella, a road trip across the border to surf and camp, and a snowboarding session at Mammoth Mountain. It was also a “trip of a lifetime” for Jake, who was due to start his career at an Australian hospital.

“He asked me for my advice on where to go surfing in Mexico. So I told him about this place I used to go with my grandfather in Baja. It’s this untouched stretch of the coast called La Bocana, and you have to go through this pristine valley to get there,” Dible told The Daily Beast. “I’ve been about 50 times. I even camped there alone last year. It’s heaven to me.”

“When he asked me if I wanted to come along, I accepted pretty quickly,” he added.

To better describe the location, the veteran surf photographer drew Callum a crude map of the remote beach on a paper napkin. The sketch, which Dible recreated for The Daily Beast, showed a winding dirt road off Highway 1, through Santo Tomas Valley to La Bocana.

Dible—who backed out of the trip days later due to a work conflict—was surprised when he got a call weeks later to say that Callum, his 30-year-old brother, and his newly engaged 30-year-old friend Jack Carter Rhoad, were missing after failing to show up at their Airbnb. He already knew Carter, describing him as a “local San Diego guy with a big bushy mustache and high crop hair” who showed up to his photography booth with a surfboard on most weekends.

That surprise turned to horror on May 3, when the three men’s bodies were found in an abandoned, boarded-over well in rural Baja, miles away from La Bocana. The trio’s burnt-out tents and white Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck were found at a different location further north of the Ensenada private ranch.

“I drew him the map that sent them there. They were murdered nearby,” Dible said. “I was heartbroken.”

The Baja California state prosecutor’s office initially said three suspects were arrested in the slaying that they theorize was an ambushed robbery to steal their pick-up truck and tires gone wrong. One of the suspects was allegedly apprehended with one of the victim’s cellphones.

“The tourists refused and tried to fight back, but the robbers were armed. When the criminals took out their guns, the three [tourists] tried to de-escalate things, but it was too late, they beat the three of them and then shot them in the head,” a Baja state investigator previously told The Daily Beast.

The idyllic surfing excursion turned violent triple homicide sent shockwaves around the world, inspiring global headlines, ocean vigils, protests near the beach where it happened, and even condolences from the Australian prime minister. The Daily Beast spoke to several devastated friends, teammates, and coworkers to learn more about the three friends whose murders reverberated across hemispheres.

“The whole world, my outlook on everything has changed after this,” Sam Cunard, one of Callum’s friends and San Diego lacrosse teammates, told The Daily Beast. “Everything seems darker now.”

Like his Australian friend, Carter grew up playing sports. He earned his variety letters in football and soccer for his last three years at Northview High School in Georgia. Before he graduated in 2009, he was named Defensive Player of the Year in soccer.

The 5-foot-10-inch blond goalkeeper, who went by his middle name and had three siblings, then headed south to Florida Southern College, where he studied business management and continued his soccer career.

“He was the most happy-go-lucky kid on the soccer team,” Hugh Seyfarth, his Florida Southern College soccer coach, told The Daily Beast. “He was so important to the team dynamic. He was the glue that held the team together.”

Seyfarth remembers how impressed he was with Carter’s humor, self-awareness, and desire to be a valuable teammate. If another teammate was having a hard day or expressed frustration, Seyfarth said it was Carter who would try to lift them up.

“His humor was well beyond his years, too,” the coach said. “For him, every day in practice was a great thing. He was the life of the party, loved to travel, and enjoyed the outdoors.”

“I’ve been a coach for a very long time and he has always been a player that has always stuck with me,” he added. “He was just such a character on the team.”

Seyfarth said he does not remember why Carter transferred to Point Loma Nazarene University, a small San Diego Christian liberal arts college, in 2011. But his PLNU soccer page for his senior season says that Carter continued studying business administration and enjoyed bowling, wakeboarding, and snowboarding. He also described his favorite food as Chick-fil-A, his favorite movie as the heartwarming French-language film The Intouchables, and his favorite book as the Bible.

Cartel Says They Handed Over Killers of Jack Carter Rhoad and Jake and Callum Robinson to the Cops

“Reason I came to PLNU: Closest place to Heaven,” he added in the bio, which included a photo of Carter with long blond dreadlocks.

Around the same time, Callum arrived in Maryland from the other side of the world to begin his U.S. lacrosse career after a successful run in Australia. His life in the U.S. got off to a rocky start. Callum was originally supposed to play for the Maryland Terrapins, but the Baltimore Banner reported that Callum pivoted to Stevenson University about 42 miles away after the University of Maryland declared at the last minute there was an eligibility issue.

“Someone of that size and presence quickly became a very focal part of the team,” Parker Bratton, a teammate who helped Stevenson’s Mustangs win the 2013 NCAA title, told The Daily Beast. Bratton, who returned to the Mustangs this year as part of its coaching team, added of his mate, “It was pretty phenomenal to see someone like that. I’m a pretty big guy, I’m like 6 foot 1, 200 pounds, he made me feel pretty small.”

Brent Hiken said he never forgot when he first met Callum in the fall of 2012 after hearing rumors “about this monster of a human being joining the team from Australia.” He and several team members were in the Stevenson weight room when Callum strolled in wearing a tight tank top and 5-inch jean shorts.

“The fashion then was wearing knee-length shorts and he walked in with these short short jean shorts. It was amazing,” Hiken told the Daily Beast. “And we went out to practice and I just remember that he came out with no pads on, just a helmet and he didn’t find it to be a big deal. That’s how they did it in Australia.”

Bratton and Hiken, like several other teammates who spoke to The Daily Beast, remember having an instant connection with the 250-pound defenseman they called the “Big Koala” and the “Australian Thor.”

“Cal is often the center of attention everywhere he goes. He just had this effect on the world—everyone was just happy to be with him,” Peter Green, a former teammate and one of his best friends, told The Daily Beast. “And he was equally as happy to be with people. I am just so thankful to be his friend.”

His size, speed, and agility immediately made him a big name in the sport—but it was his kindness, ease, sensitivity, and infectious smile that made him a star.

His teammates say that Callum was also one of the smartest players on the team, earning a chemistry degree in just three years. (“He could do high-level organic chemistry in this sleep,” Greg Furshman, a close friend and Stevenson lacrosse alum, told The Daily Beast.)

Family was also a priority for him, as he remained close with this equally tall younger brother despite being on the other side of the world. “Cal always spoke so highly of his brother,” Green said.

In 2014, Callum was selected to play for Australia’s national team at the World Lacrosse Championship in Denver, Colorado. Even though he was still a junior—and Australia finished fourth—his friends say that it seemed like Callum was all anyone could talk about.

“This was his big coming out party,” Mike Simon, another Stevenson lacrosse alum, told The Daily Beast. “I was watching at home and the highlights were all filled with Cal.”

Months later, during his senior year, Callum was picked 27th overall in the Major League Lacrosse draft to join the Chesapeake Bayhawks. He was just one of a handful of Stevenson players to go pro.

Australian men’s lacrosse team head coach Glenn Meredith said he first learned about Callum two years before they worked together in Denver—and immediately knew he was special. After coaching him at two World Championships, Meredith told The Daily Beast that Callum’s talent and “zest for life” was unparalleled.

“He would go on to show that, becoming the greatest athlete I have ever been involved with in my time in our sport,” he said.

And Callum wasn’t the only one to go pro. Carter played a year of professional soccer for Deportivo Mixco in Guatemala after he graduated college in 2014—before returning to the San Diego area to take up a more conventional career.

Swarupa Ellamaraju met Carter in 2019 when he was working as a staff services recruiter for other companies. She said that Carter had a “knack for finding connections” and took pride in finding candidates who wanted to help the company’s purpose.

“He was someone who was a great connector of people,” Ellamaraju told The Daily Beast. “That’s what was different about him as a recruiter. He wasn’t there to sell something, he truly wanted the best for everyone involved.”

Carter wrote on his LinkedIn page: “I love people… building genuine relationships is one of the most rewarding things in life, and I feel humbled every day by the people who surround me.”

Around that time, Callum was also preparing for a big step: moving across the country. He had already had a successful professional career by anyone’s standards—two seasons with the Bayhawks, followed by two seasons with the Atlanta Blaze.

“If you think of Mount Rushmore of the lacrosse world, he is on it. He’s one of the most famous people,” Cunard explained.

In 2019, he signed on with the Premier Lacrosse League as a New York Atlas LC player. By the end of that year, Callum decided to move to California. The move was inevitable, because as his friend Mike Simon describes it, “he had salt water in his veins.”

“He loved surfing and being near the water, and the resemblance to where he grew up was undeniable,” Simon told The Daily Beast.

Jake, meanwhile, was also finding his feet. Described as “a happy, gentle, and compassionate soul who was pursuing a career in medicine,” by his mother, Jake also had a love for surfing.

“It was no coincidence that many of the hospitals that he worked in were close to surfing beaches,” Debra Robinson told reporters.

Callum’s college roommate and best friend, Jesse Horn, remembers Jake as the “quieter brother, but still lived life to the fullest.” He says he fully understood Jake after one trip to visit the Robinsons in Australia—where he said the younger brother and friends were “accomplished, but didn’t take themselves too seriously. They were goofballs at heart.”

“They did not neglect the serious parts of their life, but they enjoyed it. They loved concerts, traveling, surfing,” Horn told The Daily Beast. “Jake was the doctor, but he was also a free spirit.”

According to his Facebook profile, Jake began studying at Notre Dame University in 2016. He appears to be connected to the Medical Students’ Association of Notre Dame, appearing in photos on Facebook in 2016 and 2019. A 2020 Undergraduate Course Guide offers a glimpse into a four-week research training and medical elective trip to Nepal undertaken by Jake in 2019, in which he, along with a group of other Australian medicine students, teamed up with interns from Kathmandu’s Patan Hospital, “to train together on global health research to improve outreach in the largely rural nation before going out into the communities to provide healthcare.”

“We got amazing insights into the lives of the Nepali people living outside the Kathmandu Valley—especially the challenges they face with health, travel, housing, education, and agriculture in the mountainous terrain,” Jake said.

As part of the trip, Jake trekked 10,000 feet above sea level and “watched the sunrise” over Dhaulagiri, the seventh-highest mountain in the world. In typical Robinson family style, he made time to meet and greet the locals, “organizing and playing a giant game of hacky sack with nearly 50 local kids.”

Back in the States, his brother Callum spent his next few years living along the southern California coast before settling in San Diego in 2019. At the age of 31, he finally pivoted his career away from full-time professional sport to sales, joining Snap! Mobile in the fall of 2022 as a regional development manager.

“He was awesome, so energetic, jovial, and very charismatic,” James Dudley, who onboarded Callum at Snap!, told The Daily Beast. “He was just a big koala bear.”

Across the world, Jake’s career also began to evolve. After graduation, he worked at numerous regional hospitals across Australia. He was a “respected and well-liked previous employee at South Metropolitan Health Service,” the chief executive said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

St. John of God Bunbury Hospital CEO Jeffrey Williams also described Jake as “a respected, compassionate and caring doctor” who worked at the hospital as a medical registrar in 2023.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Williams said Jake “embedded himself in the fabric of our hospital making a lasting difference to the lives of those he cared for and his colleagues. His collaborative spirit, sense of fun, and dedication to his future as a doctor has been fondly remembered by our entire hospital community.”

Callum, meanwhile, could not stay away from the lacrosse field. He joined the San Diego Lacrosse Club around 2021, securing his defenseman spot on the 35-man roster alongside Cunard. When he wasn’t on the field, or at work, he was moving into an apartment, finding love, attending concerts, and surfing.

It was during one of his surf sessions that Callum reportedly met Carter, who was going through exciting life changes of his own.

During a catch-up with Ellamaraju at the beginning of the year, Carter excitedly revealed that he recently got engaged “to the love of his life.” The wedding was set for August in Columbus, Ohio.

“He was looking forward to this next chapter in his life and we made a tentative plan to see each other in person in May,” she said. “When he didn’t reach out again, I had an eerie feeling something was not right.”

The last phone call Peter Green had with his best friend was one of the happiest.

Callum was excitedly detailing his itinerary for his birthday trip with Jake and some friends. In response, Green asked Callum to be a groomsman at his wedding.

“It was one of the very few times I’ve ever heard him so excited,” Green recalled about the April 19 call. “He was hyping up that only in southern California can you surf and snowboard in one day. I told him that was not technically true—logically—but it just showed how excited he was to be living where he was living.”

Green said the conversation turned to his October wedding and a date he had initially been worried might interfere with Callum’s need to renew his visa. “Without a doubt. No matter what, mate, I’ll make it happen,” he told Green. The conversation then pivoted to potential bachelor party dates and locations and ended with Green promising to send Callum rental homes to review after his trip.

Horn, who had scheduled Zoom calls with Callum every other Wednesday, spoke to his best friend just days before he embarked. Callum and Jake were together at that last Zoom—and both were excited to go on another adventure together.

“Cal made every trip the trip of a lifetime,” Horn said, adding that the siblings went on at least three trips together in the U.S. before this birthday adventure.

And at first, the boys’ trip appeared picture-perfect. After Coachella, Callum and Jake set out to Mexico with Carter and another Snap! colleague JT FitzGerald. The group sipped cans of Tecate on an Ensenda patio, ate street tacos al pastor, and relaxed in a Jacuzzi in meticulously documented photos on Callum’s Instagram. In one shot, Carter is beaming with an old-school boombox on his shoulder with the caption, “Mexican Bluetooth.”

FitzGerald left the group in Ensenada on April 27, when the rest of the group was set to check into their Airbnb. The same day, Callum posted a picture of his white pickup truck packed with a surfboard.

“…and it begins,” the caption of his last Instastory read.

Exactly what happened to Carter, Jake, and Callum over the next few days is still unknown. On April 29, the FBI and Mexican authorities initiated a search after the trio was officially reported missing. Group chats began blowing up, culling information from local Mexican news outlets and their own knowledge of the Baja peninsula to determine if the lack of communication was a cell service problem or something more dangerous.

By May 1, the Robinsons’ mom took to Facebook for help. “Reaching out to anyone who has seen my two sons. They have not contacted us since Saturday 27th April,” Debra wrote. “They are traveling with another friend, an American citizen. They were due to book into an Airbnb in Rosarito after their camping weekend but they did not show up. Callum is a type one diabetic so there is also a medical concern. Please contact me if you have seen them or know their whereabouts. Thank you.”

The next day, the FBI confirmed their bodies had been found in Santo Tomas, Baja. The aftershocks of Jake, Callum, and Carter’s murders are still reverberating, weeks later.

Bratton described how on the day he found out Callum had died, at least 40 alumni turned up to that day’s lacrosse game.

“Some of the guys that played before me, guys that had played there after me, some guys that played there with both us… we got to spend a moment,” Bratton said, describing his hug with Green at the time as “nuts, it was insane, it was like, so real. To get that out of Pete… to have something like that to pull that out of Peter, and we will always be connected, but that connection is going to become even deeper. We’re not perfect, you gotta deal with some knuckleheads, but at the end of the day you have those guys’ backs.”

Mexican authorities are still working on the case, while those stateside and in Australia are coming to terms with their new—darker—reality. Many questions remain for friends and family, and while arrests have been made, the Baja California state prosecutor’s office told The Daily Beast that no updates were available on the case.

“This is a wake-up call for sure,” Dible said. “These guys didn’t die for nothing because it’s hurting everyone down there. Even surfers are afraid. But I just hope the guys got one good wave in.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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