NEW YORK, NEW YORK (The Daily Whatever Press)—A college student in Manhattan “died after she was drugged and raped,” according to NBC News, which is a sentence with a dead girl in it and not one single person doing a goddamn thing.
A seventh-grade English teacher would hand that sentence back bleeding red ink. Who drugged her? Who raped her? The headline doesn’t know. The headline has never met him. She simply died—after—the way a houseplant dies after you go to Cabo for a week and forget to tell your pet sitter to water the damn ficus.
Schoolhouse Rock taught my entire generation that a verb is what’s happening, and somebody has to be doing it. So, NBC, as a public service: the verb you’re fumbling for is killed, and the noun is murder.
What prosecutors say happened
On March 18, Moises Freire, 19, of the Bronx—who was not a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology—showed up at two young women’s dorm rooms with what he told them was “pure cocaine” from Mexico. According to federal prosecutors, it was fentanyl—and he knew it was fentanyl. He’d previously described it as “fake” and “poison.” He’d also messaged, in a sentence I will never be able to unread: “I got straight poison.”
He allegedly told his supplier, 18-year-old Brian Peralta Cabrera of Queens, that he wanted drugs that would “last the entire night,” and that if they were strong enough to get the women hooked, that would be a “win-win situation.”
Win-win. For whom, exactly?
Both women lost consciousness almost immediately. Prosecutors say Freire then raped one of them while she was overdosing, as her friend lay unconscious several feet away. Then he allegedly texted nude photos of the women instead of calling 911. For 45 minutes. Then—and only then—he walked over to campus security and told them the girls had “had too much to drink.”
She went into a coma and died three days later, on March 21. Her friend survived. Prosecutors haven’t released her name, and I’m not going to go digging for it. She was somebody’s kid living in a dorm at fashion school, which means she was somebody’s whole fucking world.
Per the New York Post story, her name was Annabel Richter.
They went on to quote her mom:
“‘Annabel was full of life,’ Richter’s mother, Flavia Rocha, told The Post. ‘She knew loads about music and art and had a contagious laughter. Her presence filled the room. For us, her family and her friends, she was and always will be, our beloved Bel.’”
Our beloved Bel.
My heart just died a little. Again.
She drank too much
That cover story is the tell.
Of every lie available to a man standing over two poisoned women, he allegedly reached for the oldest one on the shelf: she drank too much. It’s the lie that gets told about women in emergency rooms, in police reports, at frat parties, and in the comment sections under every single story like this one. It works because it moves the subject of the sentence. Suddenly she’s the one who did something. She drank. She partied. She made choices.
Which brings us right back to the headline. “Died after she was drugged” and “she drank too much” are the same grammatical magic trick—the man vanishes and the woman is left holding the verb—and one of them was allegedly invented by the guy accused of doing it.
TMZ, never one to be outdone, reported that she “unwittingly took fentanyl,” as if the problem were her lack of wit and not the guy who allegedly handed her poison and called it party favors. That’s not a typo-level mistake. That’s 40 years of newsroom muscle memory that says when something terrible happens to a woman, you describe what she did.
We were trained for this, and it didn’t matter
I’m GenX. I came of age in the late-’90s roofie panic, when every issue of Sassy*, every campus orientation, and every nervous mother in America drilled the same commandments: watch your drink, cover your cup, never set it down, never take one you didn’t see poured. Congress passed the Drug-Induced Rape Prevention and Punishment Act in 1996, and we all took the lesson home and tattooed it on our frontal lobes.
Thirty years of defense training, and none of it covers a guy who walks into your room carrying the weapon and the cover story. Every one of those rules assumed the danger was something that could happen to your drink. The danger was always the man.
I’m raising two daughters. I’ve given them the drink speech. I am realizing, with a fury I can feel in my molars and my fists alike, that the drink speech is a speech about how to be a slightly harder target—and that the people writing the headlines still talk about us like goddamn weather systems.
Things that happen. Things that die after.
The word they won’t print
The necessary caveat: these are allegations. Freire and Peralta Cabrera pleaded not guilty to earlier charges in April. A third man, Harry Rosales Pino, already pleaded guilty on the drug-distribution side and is set to be sentenced in December. Nobody has been convicted of anything in this woman’s death.
And the federal charges don’t use the word, either. The counts are conspiracy and distribution “resulting in death and serious bodily injury,” plus a newer one on Freire: distributing a controlled substance with intent to commit rape. That last charge is the United States government putting in writing what the drug was for.
So the law has its vocabulary. The prosecutors have theirs—the U.S. Attorney called it a poisoning. The DEA’s Christopher Roberts said every student deserves to feel safe in her own dorm room, which is true, and also the kind of sentence you can cross-stitch on a throwpillow and then never think about again.
But the rest of us—the people reading this on our phones, the people with daughters, the people who used to be the girl in the dorm—don’t have to talk like a fucking press release. If what prosecutors describe is what happened, a man knowingly fed two young women something he himself called straight poison so he could rape one of them, then photographed them, then stalled, then blamed the booze. And one of them is dead.
There’s a word for that, NBC. It has a subject, a verb, and an object.
It’s murder.
*Hi Jane Pratt!
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Absolutely devastating and disgusting. This has to end!
Very disturbing. Usually prosecutors go hard. Why not in this case??