Four small children were poisoned and one of them died. Fentanyl was stored in a daycare center in New York, USA. The manager and her alleged accomplice will be prosecuted for drug trafficking that led to this tragedy, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.
Grei Mendez, 36, director of the Divino Niño (“divine child” in Spanish) daycare center in the Bronx neighborhood, and Carlisto Acevedo Brito, 41, who lived at the facility, were arrested Saturday, the department said in a news release. The day before, emergency services responded to the nursery after a call from Grei Mendez and found four children under three years old poisoned, one of whom, according to the same source, died at the age of one.
Children are in “immediate danger”
The two defendants and other people had been involved in the fentanyl trade since at least July, including in the nursery where “they stored large quantities”.
“Instead of caring for the well-being of these children, Grei Mendez and his accomplices put them in immediate danger by smuggling drugs and storing deadly fentanyl in the very room where the children ate, slept and played,” said the federal prosecutor the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, is quoted in the press release.
Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has flooded the drug market in the United States in recent years, is the leading cause of around 110,000 overdoses recorded in the country in 2022. Fentanyl is fifty times more powerful than heroin.