Investigators have traced the death of 17-year-old Moises Ponce Mendoza of Burlington, North Carolina to a decorative outdoor water feature at El Futuro, a bilingual community mental health nonprofit in Durham County. Mendoza splashed water on his face at the feature on August 13.
Symptoms appeared August 21. He was hospitalized August 22 and died August 31.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services released its investigation findings Tuesday, concluding the El Futuro water feature is the most likely, though not conclusively confirmed, source of his exposure to Naegleria fowleri, the so-called brain-eating amoeba…