NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who owned a New York City day care center where a toddler died after ingesting fentanyl has been sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty to federal drug charges.
Grei Mendez, 37, dropped her head into her crossed arms in anguish as Judge Jed S. Rakoff announced the sentence that triggered sobs among Mendez’s family and the mother whose 22-month-old child, Nicholas Feliz-Dominici, died in September 2023.
Rakoff had previously given the same sentence to Mendez’s husband, Felix Herrera-Garcia, after he pleaded guilty to drug charges and causing bodily harm related to the death. The couple each faced a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life for their crimes.
Mendez had pleaded guilty to drug charges including conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death.
Before the sentence was imposed, she apologized to the families of children who attended the Divino Niño day care that she operated out of a Bronx apartment where the couple stored and packaged narcotics.
“I do want all to know it was an accident,” she said through an interpreter. “I am very sorry. I hope that someday I may be forgiven.”
When the poisoning occurred on Sept. 15, 2023, Feliz-Dominici was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died. Three other children exposed to the fentanyl at the day care survived after medics administered the overdose-reversing drug Narcan.
Police found a brick of fentanyl stored on top of playmats for the children, along with equipment often used to package drugs, as well as packages of fentanyl beneath a trap door in a play area.
Both of Feliz-Dominici’s parents spoke at the sentencing, with the child’s mother saying it was not possible to forgive Mendez and the father describing the lasting pain, saying: “We’re living, but we’re not alive.”
Rakoff cited the emotions he once felt when his older brother “was murdered in cold blood,” but he added that the “glory of the law is not to ignore emotions but to put them in broader perspective.”
He said Mendez had chosen to put the welfare of her own children and her husband above the welfare of the families and their children that became customers of her day care business.
In a presentence brief, a defense attorney submitted proof that Mendez had suffered trauma herself as a child. Prosecutors urged a lengthy sentence, saying she ignored “clear warning signs” that the babies were becoming seriously ill and took no action to call for lifesaving medical intervention.
“And after tragedy struck, she lied to law enforcement and destroyed evidence in an effort to protect herself and her co-conspirators from their culpability in the death of one baby and poisoning of three others,” they wrote.
In a release, Acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky said Mendez put babies as young as 8 months old “in harm’s way as they slept, played and ate in a room where over 11 kilograms of fentanyl was hidden underneath their feet.”