Man Whose Fentanyl Stash Killed Child at Day Care Gets 45-Year Sentence

Felix Herrera Garcia stepped over the boy’s body before fleeing the Bronx day care center, prosecutors said. The same kitchen utensils used for snacks were used to package drugs, they said.

Felix Herrera Garcia’s wife called him on a September afternoon last year, just after she had discovered that three children in her Divino Niño day care center would not wake up.

He ran to the basement facility in the Bronx, which prosecutors say he had long used to store and package opioids. There, prosecutors said, Mr. Herrera Garcia would have stepped over a 22-month-old boy lying on a kindergarten mat, poisoned by fentanyl.

Mr. Herrera Garcia was gone before an ambulance arrived, beginning a two-week flight to Mexico that ended with an arrest in California. The 22-month-old, Nicholas Dominici, was dead before Mr. Herrera Garcia had made it out of the Bronx.

On Wednesday, Mr. Herrera Garcia, who pleaded guilty in June to possessing narcotics with the intent to distribute and conspiring to distribute narcotics resulting in serious injury and death, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan to 45 years in prison.

The events last year at Divino Niño, in which four healthy toddlers were grievously sickened within hours of being dropped off by their parents, horrified people across New York City and beyond.

Additional details in court documents provided the most detailed description yet of the lethal episode and the events surrounding it. The documents include new information about how Divino Niño functioned as a secret stash house, with the kitchen implements used to prepare children’s meals doubling as drug-packaging tools, a circumstance that prosecutors said was probably responsible for the poisonings.

On Wednesday, Mr. Herrera Garcia apologized to the parents of the children, insisting that he had tried to help them before fleeing.

“I have nightmares about what happened that day,” he said.

A moment later, in delivering his sentence, Judge Jed S. Rakoff said that the defendant had created the risk to “the pitiful innocent babes that were poisoned and, in one case, killed.”

Defense lawyers had asked for a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison, saying their client, who had entered the United States illegally from the Dominican Republic, would be in his mid-50s when released and subject to deportation, “a severe penalty in itself.”

Prosecutors requested a life sentence, citing the harm to the children at Divino Niño and saying that Mr. Herrera Garcia had “trafficked in large quantities of fentanyl despite knowing that it had killed his own brother and believing it had sent his own young son to the hospital.”

Before Mr. Herrera Garcia was sentenced, Nicholas’s mother and father addressed the court. His mother, Zoila Dominici, said she slept at night with his clothes under her pillow.

“I cannot imagine what my son must’ve been going through in his last moments,” she said, adding: “To celebrate your child’s birthday in a cemetery is no easy thing.”

Over the past decade, opioid abuse has become widely recognized as a scourge. By 2022, the rates of overdose death in New York City were the highest since reporting began two decades before. Synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which can be 50 times stronger than heroin, killed nearly 75,000 people in the United States last year.

The poisonings at Divino Niño, located in the basement of a brick building a mile west of the New York Botanical Garden, prompted an outpouring of anger and grief, in large part because children had been harmed in a place trusted to protect them. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said after Nicholas’s death that it was “simply staggering” that traffickers had kept heroin and fentanyl in “the very space in which the children ate, slept and played.”

In addition to Mr. Herrera Garcia, four people, including his wife, Grei Mendez, were charged in an indictment obtained by Mr. Williams’s office, which has jurisdiction over the Bronx. Two defendants, Renny Antonio Parra Paredes and Jean Carlo Amparo Herrera, have pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute narcotics and are awaiting sentencing.

Mr. Herrera Garcia admitted being involved in trafficking since 2014, prosecutors wrote to the court. The one-bedroom basement apartment that he had leased in 2022 was first used to compress powdered narcotics into bricks and to place drugs into glassine envelopes, prosecutors said, activity that continued even after Ms. Mendez turned the space into a day care.

Prosecutors wrote that Mr. Herrera Garcia, his wife and Mr. Parra Paredes packaged the drugs using “kitchen utensils such as bowls, pans and sponges — some of the very same utensils that were then used to prepare food for the children.”

In court on Wednesday, a prosecutor, Maggie Lynaugh, told Judge Rakoff that tests showed that Nicholas had ingested a “very substantial” amount of fentanyl, adding: “The likely source of the ingestion was the children’s lunch.”

Prosecutors wrote that a six-hour packaging session took place two nights before the children were poisoned. On that day, three of them took naps just after lunch and a fourth was picked up by his mother. The first sign of trouble came hours later when Ms. Mendez could not wake the children in her care.

She called a community organization in the Bronx that had placed the children into the day care program, prosecutors wrote, then called Mr. Herrera Garcia, with whom she lived in a neighboring building, and finally called 911.

Mr. Herrera Garcia rushed to the basement.

“The defendant was not there to help the babies,” prosecutors wrote. “He was there to rescue his drugs.”

Mr. Herrera Garcia entered the building through the front door, according to prosecutors, and would have stepped over Nicholas, who was lying in a hallway just inside the facility. Less than two minutes later, Mr. Herrera Garcia exited the building through a back alley. Images from video footage show him carrying two bags and climbing through bushes.

Soon after, an emergency medical technician found Nicholas “lifeless on the floor with blue lips, no pulse and no respiration,” prosecutors wrote. The other children were also faring poorly. One 2-year-old arrived at a hospital in acute respiratory failure. He was revived with Narcan, an overdose reversal agent, but had to receive an intravenous drip of that medication to avoid slipping back into unconsciousness. Doctors worked for 30 minutes to save Nicholas but he never regained a pulse.

Investigators quickly found a kilo-size brick of fentanyl inside a closet in the day care facility. About a week later, after a tip, investigators used a plunger to lift floor tiles in the playroom, revealing hidden compartments that contained more than 11 kilos of narcotics, including fentanyl and heroin.

Mr. Herrera Garcia hid for a night at a friend’s apartment in the Bronx, prosecutors wrote, then fled for two weeks across the United States and into Mexico.

The authorities were looking for what a prosecutor called “extremely time-sensitive” information: Mr. Herrera Garcia’s phone number, which they believed could help locate and arrest him. Mr. Parra Paredes provided that in return for credit for his assistance. Prosecutors wrote that Mexican immigration officials had expelled Mr. Herrera Garcia, who was then arrested in San Diego.

While making their sentencing argument to Judge Rakoff, prosecutors wrote that “drug traffickers need to understand that hiding their illegal activities behind children will be met with the most serious of consequences.”

They also said that Mr. Herrera Garcia had continued to traffic narcotics even after he, Ms. Mendez and their child had all become sick after handling fentanyl or visiting the basement day care center. And, they wrote, he had not been deterred when his brother died of acute fentanyl intoxication in 2022 while packaging drugs in the Bronx.

Rather, prosecutors wrote, Mr. Herrera Garcia responded to that death by “transferring his brother’s remaining narcotics to what would become the day care space so that he could carry on the family business.”