Shawnee Baker fell to her knees and vomited when she saw her daughter, Baylie Grogan, 19, lying in the hospital bed, her body grossly swollen, and her head disfigured.
The pre-med student was barely alive after walking into oncoming traffic on a busy highway in the early hours of Sunday August 19, 2018.
As a former trauma nurse Shawnee was all too aware of how dire her daughter’s injuries were and how low her chance of survival.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail she says: ‘I’d never seen a patient with anything close to Baylie’s injuries. She was on a ventilator with drains in her skull to release fluid from her brain.’
Nine hours later, if the sight of her broken teen wasn’t horrifying enough, the police delivered the shocking news that they suspected foul play.
Shawnee, now 47, had last seen Baylie only three days prior after spending a week helping her settle into her new dorm ahead of her sophomore year at the University of Miami.
She says the aspiring doctor ‘simply wanted to help people.’ A straight ‘A’ student she wasn’t put off by the prospect of 15 years of study to become a neurosurgeon.
Like any mother, Shawnee had worried about Baylie being so far from their home in Boston, Massachusetts but she knew she was a sensible girl.
Baylie Grogan, pictured at her senior prom in 2017, dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon, even though it would take 15 years to qualify. Tragically, her life couldn’t be saved by teams of top brain surgeons at hospitals in Miami and Boston.
Baylie pictured with her mother, Shawnee Baker in 2017. Shawnee has since set up Baylie’s Wish, a foundation to promote student safety and advocate for healthcare proxies.
She had settled quickly and happily at her sorority, Zeta Tan Alpha, and Shawnee, to whom she was exceptionally close and texting or calling every day, trusted her.
Now, as she looked down at her daughter’s maimed body, all her worst fears had come to pass.
To this day the events that led to that hospital bed are unclear – a puzzle read backwards with gaps and questions that will never be answered.
But detectives were able to piece together an alarming outline through interviews with Baylie’s friends and texts exchanged between her and them into the small hours of that fateful morning.
According to her sisters, Baylie rarely drank alcohol and never took drugs but earlier in the day they had let their hair down at a pool party thrown to celebrate the birthday of a student at the house he rented.
The girls headed home around 4pm to shower and have dinner before meeting the birthday group at 7pm inside a handful of bars in downtown Miami.
Bartenders confirmed to investigators the insistence of Baylie’s dormmates that she drank only water beyond 7pm.
Around midnight, Baylie told the group she was tired and decided to return to the sorority. She said she was meeting one of the male friends outside the club who was going to escort her home.
He didn’t show up. Baylie attempted to return to the bar but was turned away after the bouncer spotted her fake ID.
She told the girls that she’d ordered an Uber Rideshare then, in a move that still haunts those who knew her, she canceled that ride after saying she’d been approached by two young men in the street, who claimed they were University of Miami medical students heading in the same direction as her.
Little can be shared about the strangers who appeared to be Good Samaritans but turned out to be quite the opposite.
It appears that their promise to take Baylie home was insincere as records from the Uber show the car traveled a five-mile loop instead.
Meanwhile Baylie sent a series of increasingly troubling texts to her friends describing the men as ‘sketchy,’ and, alarmingly, saying they wouldn’t tell her their real names.
Surveillance footage shows them buying water at a convenience store and stopping by an apartment. One of the men went into the apartment and returned with solo cups containing water.
Baylie pictured as a sweet, happy-go-lucky child. Her mother said she loved to make other people laugh.
Baylie with her mom, Shawnee, and older brothers, Mickenzie and Tristan, on vacation in 2018 — the same year that she was killed at the age of just 19.
‘They want me to drink the water,’ Baylie texted her roommate. In a further text, she wrote: ‘They want me to drink it too much.’
In his later interview with police the Uber driver who was interviewed said that the teen — who was sitting between the two men — spilled her water over the back seat. Today her mother wonders if this was a deliberate attempt to get the drivers’ attention and help.
If it was it didn’t work. Instead, he told the passengers to give him money to get the car valeted. When they refused, saying it was just water, the driver kicked them out.
The drop-off was in a populated area of downtown Miami and, according to her texts, Baylie was able to slip into the crowd and escape the men.
She told her friends that she was disorientated and couldn’t see properly to operate her phone and order another Uber. The friends — who have since been tortured by thoughts they should have called 911 or found a car to pick her up themselves — sent her a code from a location app so they could track where she was going.
She was three miles from the dorm but, terrified they’d get everyone into trouble from the university for underage drinking, the pair encouraged her to walk home, despite the heavy rain.
‘Baylie was just a block away when she walked onto the road,’ Shawnee says. The last text sent to her phone was a friend’s frantic question, ‘Why haven’t you moved in ten minutes?’
Then they heard the wail of sirens. Baylie had been struck by a car. Witnesses carried her to the edge of the highway where she was treated by first responders.
Baylie, a keen equestrian, adored her horse, Dark Secret, whom she was gifted at the age of 12. They won a number of showjumping competitions and her mom, Shawnee, treasures the trophies.
Baylie was a proud member of the Zeta Tan Alpha sorority at the University of Miami where she was an academically-gifted pre-med student with a promising future.
It was 3.10am. Five hours later, during a sailboat vacation off the coast of Maine, Shawnee and Baylie’s stepfather, Scott, 56, received a heart stopping call from Miami-Dade police who said there had been a ‘terrible accident’. He told them to contact the hospital where a surgeon advised them to come to Miami immediately because they might have to say goodbye to their daughter.
The journey to Baylie’s hospital bed was as agonizing as it was arduous and there was no consolation or room for hope on their arrival. Shawnee recalls, ‘She was unrecognizable because her entire body was swollen and so bruised and beaten.
‘I was sobbing and throwing up because I knew as a nurse that she wouldn’t come back.’
The medical staff had shaved Baylie’s head for surgery, and she had a giant horseshoe cut on the side.
She had four hemorrhages to her brain and a broken neck and pelvis. The doctors had cut her from sternum to groin to try and stop internal bleeding from injuries including a ruptured bladder.
Soon after Shawnee and Scott were able to see her, the surgeons came to drill holes in her skull to allow more fluid to drain.
Shawnee kept vigil in Baylie’s room for a month, holding her hand and praying for a miracle. She played her favorite music such as Coldplay and Taylor Swift, reflecting on their 19 years together.
She looked on helplessly at her lighthearted little girl, the easygoing child who made others laugh.
Outside of school, she competed in equestrian events with her horse Dark Secret, whom her mother and stepfather had gifted her at 12.
‘She would be at the barn at 5am every day and the same after school,’ Shawnee says. ‘She had such a connection with her horse and said that they could read each other’s minds.’
Initially police said Baylie had been in a ‘pedestrian accident’ but at 10am on Monday, they said that they were ‘disturbed’ by surveillance footage that showed Baylie had been walking in a strange manner.
They said they had seen the ‘zombie’ like gait before in victims of the so-called date-rape drug, Rohypnol.
They ordered a toxicology report, but 36 hours had already passed since the accident. The test came back negative. If Baylie had ingested any Rohypnol it would have been metabolized and undetectable by the time she was tested.
The police traced the men who were in the Uber with Baylie that night. One sent her an Instagram message while she was in the hospital. It said, ‘How did you like your water?’
Both in their thirties, they were taken in for questioning but denied any wrongdoing. There was no evidence that Baylie had been drugged so they were never charged with a crime. The Mail has chosen not to name them as a result.
‘I don’t know what I would do if I saw them today,’ Shawnee says.
As for Baylie’s friends, she does not blame them for their response to her predicament. ‘They were just kids trying to do the best they could in the circumstances,’ she says.
Baylie died on September 27, 2018, after her family made the devastating decision to authorize the withdrawal of medical support.
Shawnee has set up a foundation, Baylie’s Wish, in her daughter’s honor. The organization offers advice to students and encourages colleges to support their safety on and off campus. It also stresses the need for healthcare proxies so families can make legal decisions on behalf of young adults.
Two weeks earlier, she had been flown from Miami to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where a new team of neurosurgeons hoped to treat her.
However, its state-of-the-art testing found definitive evidence that neurons weren’t connecting inside Baylie’s brain, and she had barely a one per cent chance of survival.
Shawnee knew her daughter didn’t want to live in a vegetative state – hauntingly she had told her that very thing just one year earlier in what seemed like a wildly hypothetical mother/daughter chat.
Shawnee recalls: ‘She said, “Mom, there’s something worse than dying,”
‘When I asked, “What?’ she said, “Being trapped in a body that doesn’t work would be so much worse.”
‘She said, “Promise me you’ll never let that happen to me.”’
In the aftermath of her daughter’s death, Shawnee admits, she struggled to find purpose in her own life.
But ultimately, she found it in her family – Mickenzie, 28 and Tristan, 27, her two older children from her first marriage to Baylie’s dad – and little ones Savannah, six, and Seraphina, four, whom she had with Scott.
Last October, she established a foundation in her late daughter’s honor called Baylie’s Wish.
The organization promotes campus safety, especially where drugs or alcohol are involved. Many colleges have a ‘one strike and you’re out’ attitude to underage drinking making students scared of being found out.
But, Shawnee says, the schools should — at the very least — provide an amnesty for first-time offenders.
The non-profit has also collaborated with the makers of a safety app that sends automatic alerts to appointed friends or family members if someone feels threatened or has been taken to an unfamiliar place.
Shawnee’s other campaign is to warn parents and students about the risks of not having a healthcare proxy.
Without one, the mom says, relatives are left unable to make life-or-death decisions about children aged 18 and over who are classed as adults in the eyes of the law.
She published a book about the ordeal titled simply, ‘Baylie,’ in March 2025.
‘Nothing can bring Baylie back — not even justice — but we will never forget her determination to help people,’ Shawnee says.
‘If her story can save one life, she’ll have made that goal.’
If you have been sexually assaulted or suspect that you may have been subjected to a so-called date rape drug such as Rohypnol, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800 656 4673.
