A Hollywood producer charged with first-degree murder was convicted Tuesday in the drug overdose deaths of a Los Angeles model and her friend.
The jury spent about 7 1/2 hours in deliberations, which began Friday in the trial of David Brian Pearce, who also was convicted of seven counts of sexual assault for attacks on seven other women.
Pearce, 42, stood trial in the deaths 24-year-old model and aspiring actress Christy Giles and her 26-year-old friend Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola. The two women were taken to separate Los Angeles-area hospitals about two hours apart on Nov. 13, 2021.
In her closing argument last Thursday, Deputy District Attorney Catherine Mariano told jurors that Pearce knew the dangers of fentanyl, but still gave the women fentanyl and GHB because he wanted to sexually assault them.
Pearce's attorney, Jeff Voll, said that his client did not give the women drugs and urged juror to acquit Pearce.
In addition to the murder charge, a grand jury indictment returned against Pearce in December 2022 charged him with murder in the deaths of the two women, along with three counts of forcible rape, two counts of sexual penetration by use of force and one count each of rape of an unconscious person and sodomy by use of force -- with all of the sexual assault charges involving alleged crimes against seven women between 2007 and 2020.
The jury was unable to reach verdicts on charges against co-defendant Brandt Walter Osborn, who was facing two counts of being an accessory after the fact. The judge declared a mistrial on those charges after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked.
Osborn, 45, allegedly accompanied Pearce in a Toyota Prius with no license plates attached to the hospitals where Giles and Cabrales-Arzola were left.
The women were believed to have been drugged and left outside two hospitals. Hetty Chang reports for the NBC4 News on Thursday, Dec. 16, 2021.
Osborn's attorney, Michael Artan, told jurors that the Osborn should be found not guilty on the two counts with which he is charged. Artan questioned the accounts of two key prosecution witnesses, including Michael Ansbach, who was arrested along with Pearce and Osborn but never charged.
Ansbach testified that Pearce told him, "Dead girls don't talk."
Pearce met the two women at an after-hours rave in downtown Los Angeles, according to the prosecutor.
Giles was already dead when she was taken to Southern California Hospital in Culver City, while Cabrales-Arzola, an architect, was alive outside Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Hospital but in critical condition. Her
family took her off life support later that month, a day before her 27th birthday.
The deaths of the two women were classified as homicides by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner, with toxicology reports finding multiple drugs present in both victims' systems, according to the department.
Giles died of a mixture of cocaine, fentanyl, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid and ketamine, while Cabrales-Arzola died of multiple organ failure with cocaine, methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy) and other undetermined drugs
found in her system.
The prosecutor told jurors in her closing argument that there was no reason for Pearce's DNA to be found on the two women, including under Cabrales-Arzola's fingernails, if they weren't drugged and then sexually assaulted.
"This is no accident, no mistake," she said.
Mariano told jurors that Pearce and Osborn waited hours to leave the residence they shared on Olympic Boulevard in the Pico-Robertson district to take Giles to the hospital when she was already dead. They returned to their apartment and took Cabrales-Arzola to a different hospital about two hours later, she said.
The defense attorney suggested that the drug may have instead been "accidentally ingested" after being mistaken for cocaine.
