How Rosita Dies On The Walking Dead

Rosita Espinosa, played by Christian Serratos, was a fan-favorite character on "The Walking Dead" and quite a badass at that. She was also the last person to die on the show. Luke (Dan Fogler) and his girlfriend Jules (Alex Sgambati) died earlier in the series finale, but a bigger death was almost guaranteed in the episode, and Rosita drew the short straw. This was without a doubt one of the saddest deaths on "The Walking Dead," and for a show that bumped off so many main characters over its run, that's saying something.

Rosita went on quite the journey. She started off as Abraham's girlfriend and a protector of Eugene. Then she became consumed by vengeance when Abraham was murdered, attempting to take out his killer (Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan) and risking the wrath of his group, the Saviors, as a result. However, she mellowed out by the eighth season, and by Season 9, she was pregnant with her daughter, Socorro, who was nicknamed Coco.

Becoming a mother changed Rosita, and even though she didn't survive for very long after her daughter was born, she made sure Coco (played by the siblings Eleni and Elijah Carrillo) had all the protection she needed to survive in a world of walkers and corrupt humans. But how and when did Rosita die?

Where does Rosita fit into "The Walking Dead" timeline? She was introduced alongside Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt) toward the end of "Inmates," the 10th episode of Season 4. They find Tara (Alanna Masterson) and an unconscious Glenn (Steven Yeun) on the road and give them a ride in their military vehicle. However, when Glenn regains consciousness, he flees from the vehicle and Abraham and Rosita follow him. They reveal that they are taking Eugene to Washington, D.C., because he is a scientist and has secret information about how to stop the zombie apocalypse. But when a group of walkers creep up on them on the side of the road, the gunplay — mostly by the untrained Eugene — takes out the gas tanks, disabling the vehicle.

Rosita, Abraham, and Eugene eventually find a bus and take off for D.C. that way. However, before they can get there, Eugene admits the truth: He isn't actually a scientist at all and he doesn't know anything about how to stop the walker plague. It turns out that he just said that he did so that Abraham and Rosita would protect him. While that isn't welcome news to either Rosita or Abraham (Abraham beats Eugene up for lying to them in what is quite frankly an understandable moment of anger), they end up going back to the group of survivors with Tara and Glenn and joining them.

The simple answer is that a bite from a walker causes Rosita's death. This walker bit her on her shoulder when Rosita was trying to escape from a horde of them with Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and Eugene after she rescued baby Coco from a children's home. Coco was in the home because Pamela Milton (Laila Robins), the governor of the Commonwealth (which was the last place that the group of survivors ended up), had placed Rosita in a forced labor camp, landing Coco in an adoption center. After rescuing Coco, Rosita, Gabriel, and Eugene scaled a pipe alongside a building to escape from the horde, but Rosita fell from it, hitting the group of walkers as she fell. Coco was strapped to Rosita, and Rosita couldn't afford to risk Coco's life, so she got back up, fought the zombies, and managed to make it into the window above them from the pipe.

The more complicated answer is that Pamela caused Rosita's death by drawing large herds of walkers to the Commonwealth. Eventually, one overruns the place, and though Pamela wasn't targeting Rosita or her group specifically, the damage is done. While the group of survivors subdues Pamela with the help of General Michael Mercer (Michael James Shaw) and the Commonwealth's army, Rosita is already slowly succumbing to her injury. She plays with Coco, has a meal with all of the people she knows, and then is placed in bed, where she says goodbye to her closest friends. It's ultimately Eugene who makes sure she won't reanimate as a walker.

After Rosita's death, Gabriel becomes the sole parent of Coco, which we see (along with the return of two big "The Walking Dead" characters) in the epilogue of the series finale. Though he isn't her biological father, he was in a relationship with Rosita when she had Coco and had fully accepted that she and Siddiq (Avi Nash), the community doctor, had a previous relationship that resulted in Coco. When Siddiq was killed by a Whisperer and reanimated as a walker, Rosita found Siddiq and stabbed him before he could kill Coco. And when Rosita is later bitten and dies, Gabriel delivers her last rites and takes Coco out of the bedroom so she won't see her mother die.

While we don't know what ultimately happens to Coco, it's fair to say that — for the time being, at least — she lives in relative safety with Gabriel in the Commonwealth, where Ezekiel (Khary Payton) has become governor. Ezekiel is certainly more suited to the job than the last governor, and we can assume that Coco's upbringing is a relatively happy one (well, as happy as an upbringing can be in this world of walkers). Eugene, who helped with Coco when she was a baby, now has a child of his own and it's likely that he helps with Coco when he can, along with the others that have stayed in the community.

Rosita's passing was one of the moments from the finale of "The Walking Dead" that really upset fans, a death made all the more difficult because she had a young child. If you want to know who you have to blame for this, then look no further than the actor who portrayed her: The idea to kill Rosita off in the series finale came from Christian Serratos herself. Serratos has revealed that everyone in the cast wanted to know who would be killed in the final episode, but then they started to think that perhaps there were no big deaths left. This didn't sit right with Serratos, who took it upon herself to propose her character's death in the finale to showrunner Angela Kang. According to Serratos, she did this in part because it would stop her from wondering about future spin-offs.

"I couldn't not know if [Rosita] was going to ever come back or not. It was going to drive me insane. So it really helped me, Christian, have closure," Serratos told Entertainment Weekly. However, she also felt as though Rosita going out the way she did was right for the character and the show. "I mean, she was so willing to die for her loved ones and die for her child, and I just thought it really made sense for her," the actor explained. "I think a show that was about possibly losing your loved ones, you want to lose somebody at the end. I know it sounds so dark, but I feel like the show; we owed it to the fans to break their hearts one last time, if that makes sense."