A New York woman is accused of having consumed fentanyl laces drugs to trap, then deprive four men of money, phones, sneakers and other personal effects, killing three of the men in the process.
Tabitha Bundrick, 36, was charged on Wednesday for 11 counts of murder, theft, burglary and assault. The Manhattan district prosecutor, Alvin L. Bragg, called his alleged “extremely calculated” actions and noted other recent cases in New York where people died after being drugged and stolen, including outside night boxes.
“This insensitive type of behavior will not be tolerated in Manhattan,” he said at a press conference.
Bundrick, who pleaded not guilty on Wednesday, is accused of having targeted men between 2023 and 2024. On April 20, 2023, the prosecutors said that she had approached two men in the street of Washington Heights under the guise of selling their soap. The prosecutors said that she then proposed to have sex in exchange for money and led them to an empty apartment in which she allowed them, offering them fentanyl lacers that she affirmed was cocaine.
One of the men told the police that he woke up the next morning to find his friend, Mario Paullan, 42, who died next to him and their personal effects. The prosecutors said that the man had no memory of what had happened.
The prosecutors said the second death took place on September 27, 2023 in Washington Heights when Bundrick met Miguel Navez, 39, and returned to her apartment where she would have caused him fentanyl laces. Navez’s brother found him dead three days later and his missing personal effects.
In a third fatal incident, which occurred on February 25, 2024, the prosecutors said that Bundrick followed Abhan Fernandez, 34, in his building where she would have provided him with fentanyl lacers. The prosecutors said that she had taken several big bags from the apartment.
Prosecutors said Bundrick had used Fernandez’s credit card several times, as well as stolen mobile phones belonging to other men.
An e-mail was sent by asking for comments from his public defender of the city.
Bundrick pleaded guilty in February to federal accusations related to drugs resulting from the same deaths and was sentenced on August 6 to serve 156 months in prison.
His lawyers declared in a memo of determining the penalty that Bundrick “is not a calculated killer, a manipulator in the cold heart or someone who has no conscience”, but rather victim of childhood sexual abuse that works intellectually at a third year level.
They said Bundrick, a mother, is not a drug trafficker either and has only used drugs to pass through the experience of having to prostitute themselves.
“Ms. Bundrick undoubtedly made a bad decision when she shared her drug with men who” looking for a while “. But she never intended to kill anyone, “said lawyers in memo. “Indeed, she used the same exact drugs alongside each of them.”
The federal prosecutors said in a note of determining the separate sentence that even if Bundrick “may not have the intention of killing her victims when she drugged them with fentanyl”, she knew that the drug could kill them and that she still gave them and continued to give it to more men.
