Heartbroken grandmother of siblings poisoned by fentanyl at Bronx daycare reveals boy, 2, was passed out face-up on playmat and girl, eight months, was found in crib as police investigate caretakers
The devastated grandmother of two of the children who suffered a fentanyl overdose at a Bronx daycare has revealed how the siblings were found.
The mother, whose two-year-old son is in critical condition and eight-month-old daughter currently in hospital, said the tragic ordeal was “just all too much at the moment.”
Her children – who have not been identified – went to daycare with Nicholas Feliz-Dominici, the toddler who died after ingesting fentanyl while being cared for at the Divino Nino Day Care on Morris Avenue in Kingsbridge, The Bronx.
The children’s grandmother has described how the boy and girl were found unconscious, lying on a play mat on the floor and in an adjacent crib.
The police tape had been taken from the street and hung on the door of the Divino Nino Daycare on Morris Avenue.
The boy lay upright on the floor in the horrifying image on the grandmother’s phone, the newspaper reported NYPost.
She said her son-in-law called her to tell her what had happened – and she screamed into the phone.
The little boy is not doing well, and the girl is doing better today, but she is on a lot of drugs,” the grandmother told the Post.
The grandmother of the unnamed son and daughter who were rushed to hospital said: “I don’t know what happened. So much irresponsibility.
‘They’re babies. It’s her job to take care of them, protect them. She needs consequences. I can’t believe this happened. I really can’t do that.’
On Saturday evening, Divino Nino owner Grei Mendez De Ventura, 36, and her neighbor Carlisto Acevedo Brito, 41, were arrested and each faced 11 charges.
They are charged with murder with depraved indifference, manslaughter of a person under 11 years of age, reckless manslaughter causing death, four counts of assault causing injury by risk of death, four counts of assault causing injury during a crime, four counts of assault causing serious injury causing injury and four counts of reckless assault causing serious injury.
De Ventura and Brito also face three counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, criminal possession of narcotics and four counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
The two siblings, along with two others, were rushed to the hospital and given doses of Narcan to suppress the fentanyl overdose.
Pictured: the one-year-old boy who died after ingesting fentanyl at a Bronx daycare center
Meanwhile, the dead boy’s distraught father, Otoniel Feliz, 32, appeared teary-eyed as he spoke outside his apartment, just a 15-minute walk from the Morris Avenue Children’s Center. It was his son’s first week at the center, he told DailyMail.com.
Father of five Otoniel Feliz, whose son died, moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 2018 before moving with his family to the apartment near Divino Nino Day Care in 2019.
He and his wife, who wished to remain anonymous, went to the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center to find suitable child care for their son Nicholas.
While they waited nearly a year to find a place to care for the young child, they were grateful to hear that Divino Nino Day Care could help them.
‘We received a good recommendation. We were told it was a great place. It looked like a nice place,” he explained.
Otoniel Feliz appeared blue-eyed as he spoke to MailOnline.com outside his apartment
An infection tent could be seen outside the daycare center on Friday afternoon
Four children under the age of three “swallowed fentanyl” while on the premises
But within a week of being cared for at daycare, Nicholas was taking fentanyl – a substance that has caused a spike in overdoses in the US
A heartbroken Otoniel said they were given a tour of the nursery the first time they dropped their son off and it looked just like any other, with toys and children’s furniture inside.
But after enrolling their son, Otoniel and his wife were never allowed to return to their son, who was often brought to them by their caregivers, he claimed.
‘Parents are not allowed to enter. You see it the first day to see where your son will be, but after that you are not allowed to go in,” he claimed.
“They said they ‘don’t want any contamination from outside to come in because they keep everything clean,’ they said.”
He revealed the poignant moment Otoniel and his wife heard the news, explaining that she had gone to pick up her son early from daycare.
When she arrived at the center’s police tape, emergency services and officers blocked the street. Her heart skipped a beat when she received a phone call that no parent ever wants to hear.
‘My wife called me and said our child is going to the hospital. We thought he was doing well. Ten minutes later my wife called me on the way to the hospital and said he had died,” he explained, fighting back tears.
All four were taken to hospital, but Nicholas did not survive.
The children had reportedly fallen in for a nap only to wake up at 2:30 p.m. and had eaten something about 90 minutes earlier, sources said.
When police arrived at the grim scene, all four children were administered Narcan, one of whom responded to the life-saving drug squad.
Police tape hung from the doorway of the building on Saturday as officers on the scene continued their investigation.
The childcare facility has a capacity for eight children between the ages of six weeks and 12 years old, the data shows.
Sources with knowledge of the investigation confirm that ‘several drugs were found at the daycare center, as well as a kilopers
The once active crime scene had grown somber as neighbors began to grapple with the tragedy
Sources with knowledge of the investigation confirm that ‘several medications were found at the daycare center, as well as a kilopers’.
A kilo press is used to package large quantities of medicines.
Sources also confirmed that all four children “came into contact with fentanyl.”
Divino Nino Daycare passed its annual unannounced inspection on September 6 with zero violations, according to city records after receiving the permit in May.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes Fentanyl as a powerful synthetic opioid approved by the FDA for the treatment of severe pain.
Over the past decade, fentanyl has been illegally manufactured and distributed, and other illegally manufactured synthetic opioids are increasingly found in the drug supply.
During this time, fentanyl and related substances have contributed to a dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths in the United States.
Drug overdose deaths involving the synthetic opioid fentanyl more than tripled in the United States between 2016 and 2021, according to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Fentanyl is up to fifty times stronger than heroin and a hundred times stronger than morphine, and is increasingly mixed with other illicit drugs, often with fatal consequences.
The CDC report found that drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl increased from 5.7 per 100,000 people in 2016 to 21.6 per 100,000 in 2021.
Fentanyl-related deaths increased by about 55% in 2019-2020 and by 24.1% in 2020-2021, said Merianne Rose Spencer, one of the report’s authors.
In the United States, difficulties in obtaining treatment for substance abuse during the COVID pandemic have coincided with an increase in the use of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and opioid-related deaths rose to a record high in 2020.
Between 2016 and 2021, drug overdose deaths involving methamphetamine more than quadrupled, and cocaine-related overdose deaths more than doubled, according to the CDC.
Deaths from oxycodone and heroin decreased marginally during the study period.
In 2016, approximately 2 in 100,000 people died from an oxycodone overdose. In 2021, that dropped to 1.5 per 100,000 people.
The number of heroin-related deaths fell from 4.9 per 100,000 in 2016 to 2.9 in 2021, the report found.
The Biden administration has urged action as the number of drug-related overdose deaths in the U.S. surpassed 100,000 in 2021, according to government estimates.