2 charged with murder of toddler in New York City daycare

NEW YORK – A daycare centre operator and her neighbour have been charged with murder in the death of a one-year-old boy who was exposed to opioids in his first week at the centre, police said.

Grei Mendez, 36, who ran Divino Nino in the Bronx in New York City, and Carlisto Acevedo Brito, a 41-year-old man who lived at the address listed for the centre, were both arrested on Saturday evening.

They were charged with a count of murder showing “depraved indifference” in the death of Nicholas Feliz Dominici.

As at Sunday afternoon, Mendez and Acevedo Brito were waiting to be arraigned in Bronx Criminal Court on charges that included four counts of endangering a child’s welfare, 16 counts of assault and criminal possession of drugs.

At the centre, a sign reading “Welcome” remained on the door, and some candles, a bouquet of white flowers and a plastic fire truck sat by the door.

Nicholas had appeared to be adjusting well at the centre, a small, cheerful place that was affordable and had a good reputation, said his mother, Ms Zoila Dominici, who toured it on her son’s first day.

“I didn’t see anything that looked out of the ordinary,” she said. “Just little beds and toys.”

She said Mendez appeared to be a responsible woman who played the children soothing music to get them to nap.

“God gave him to me, and now he’s gone,” said Ms Dominici, a 34-year-old caregiver for the elderly who has four older children. “I have to thank God for the time we had with him.”

On Friday, emergency medical workers arrived at the six-storey brick building in the North Bronx around 2.45pm.

A neighbour said a woman who worked at the centre ran out, screaming that she could not wake the children from their nap.

Emergency workers found Nicholas, who would have turned two in November, unconscious. They also found a two-year-old boy and an eight-month-old girl, both “unconscious and unresponsive”, police said. All three children showed symptoms of opioid exposure.

They gave the young children the overdose-reversal medication Narcan and took them away.

Another two-year-old-boy, who had left the small ground-floor daycare centre shortly after noon, was taken to a hospital after his mother noticed an unusual lethargy had replaced the toddler’s normal energy.

Nicholas was pronounced dead at Montefiore Medical Centre on Friday.

By early Saturday, the other three children were in critical or stable condition.

After an autopsy on Saturday, the New York City medical examiner’s office said further examination was needed to determine Nicholas’ cause of death.

The New York Police Department’s Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny on Friday said suspicions about opioid exposure were prompted by the children’s symptoms and by the discovery of a so-called kilo press – commonly used by drug dealers when packaging large quantities of drugs – at the daycare during a search.

The opioid was not identified, but during Friday’s briefing, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Dr Ashwin Vasan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, described the dangers of fentanyl and the drug’s pervasiveness.

“This crisis is real, and it is a real wake-up call for individuals who have opioids or fentanyl in their homes,” Mr Adams said.

Dr Paul Christo, an associate professor and pain specialist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that fentanyl, a highly potent drug used to treat moderate to severe pain, can be fatal in small doses if it is ingested or injected.

Two milligrams, the equivalent of 10 grains of salt, are enough to kill an adult who ingests that amount.

But simply inhaling or touching fentanyl is “highly unlikely” to be fatal either to an adult or a small child, Dr Christo said.

Ms Dominici learnt what happened to her son when she arrived at the daycare at 3pm on Friday to pick him up, she said on Sunday. She saw police surrounding the building and Mendez inside crying, she said.

Then she received a call from a coordinator of the programme telling her Nicholas was in the hospital.

Nicholas was very intelligent, his mother said on Sunday. “Whenever he saw that I was sad, he would ask, ‘Mummy, what’s wrong?’ He would look at you with these eyes like he understood. He was very special.”

Ms Dominici said her son had been a healthy child who had not even had the flu since he was born.

His seven-year-old sister and three brothers – 13-year-old twins and an eight-year-old – doted on him, making sure he never ate anything he was not supposed to.

“He was the little prince of the house,” she said. “They took such good care of him.”

Ms Dominici said her daughter and eight-year-old son were with her when she arrived at the hospital and saw doctors surrounding Nicholas, trying to save him.

They wept as it became clear that Nicholas would not survive.

Ms Dominici said she called her husband, a groundskeeper at a golf course, to tell him what had happened.

The family is struggling with what comes next, she said.

Ms Dominici described looking at Nicholas’ crib, new clothes he had not worn and toys she had been waiting to give him.

She said she wondered what she would do with them now.

“He shouldn’t have died like that,” she said. NYTIMES