New York man charged with rape and lethal fentanyl dosing of college student

A man raped a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) after giving her a dose of fentanyl that rendered her unconscious and ultimately killed her, federal prosecutors allege. That student’s friend also experienced an overdose and nearly died after taking the potent synthetic opiate, leading to charges against three men, the US justice department said in a statement on Thursday. Moises Freire, 19, faces counts of participating in a conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and of distributing a deadly drug with intent to commit rape. Meanwhile, 18-year-old Brian Peralta Cabrera was also charged in connection with the drug conspiracy. A third defendant in the case, Harry Rosales Pino, pleaded guilty in September to plotting to distribute narcotics resulting in death and serious bodily injury. He was tentatively scheduled to be sentenced on 15 December in one of the latest prominent criminal cases in the US justice system to involve fentanyl, a primary driver of drug-related deaths in the country, according to the federal government. Freire was not a student at FIT but brought fentanyl to the dorm room of two women that he was visiting there on 18 March. He lied that the substance was pure cocaine, prosecutors contend. Though he had referred to the fentanyl in question as “straight poison”, he successfully urged the women to take the drug, and both quickly slipped into unconsciousness, prosecutors maintained. Prosecutors said the woman whom Freire is accused of raping went into a coma and died on 21 March. He, Peralta and Rosales were charged and pleaded not guilty to initial charges, which omitted the rape allegation. A transcript from an April federal court hearing shows a prosecutor alleged that Rosales sold the fentanyl at the center of the case to Peralta. Peralta in turn dealt it to Freire, who gave it to the two women at FIT, that prosecutor said. Rosales pleaded out on 16 September. And updated charges against Peralta and Freire which contained the rape allegation against the latter of those men were filed on Thursday. Neither Freire, described as being from the Bronx, nor Peralta – of Queens – had been arraigned on those superseding charges on Friday. They remained in federal custody pending the outcome of the case. The charging documents against Freire and Peralta do not name either of the women whom prosecutors said were drugged. They also do not identify FIT, which is part of the State University of New York (Suny) system. However, the April court hearing’s transcript shows that Freire’s lawyer, Mitchell Schwartz, mentioned FIT by name. Furthermore, at that hearing, the assistant US attorney Ariana Bloom, of the southern district of New York in Manhattan, provided gut-wrenching details about the rape allegations against Freire. Bloom said Freire admitted in writing that he raped the woman who later died while she was unconscious. As he put it, he had sex with her, realized she was unconscious only afterward – and then saw her friend on the floor in a similar state “with her eyes rolled back in her head”, Bloom recounted. Freire then sent pictures to others of the women while they were passed out, waited about 40 minutes and only then alerted building security to the situation, Bloom said. It was determined that the women had overdosed – one fatally – after being taken to a hospital. Bloom said Freire himself never called an ambulance.“Once things started going south, instead of calling 911 or alerting someone or prioritizing their lives, he took time to take pictures of them and to protect himself,” Bloom argued. FIT did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Associated Press contributed reporting