Police seek nursery owner's husband after child's fentanyl death

Police in New York are searching for the husband of the owner of a nursery where a one-year-old child died of suspected drug overdose and three others got sick.

Nicholas Dominici died after inhaling fentanyl at the nursery operated by Grei Mendez, who has been arrested.

The deadly drugs were recovered under the nap mats of the children, police said.

Video footage shows the husband fleeing before police arrived.

On Wednesday, an NYPD spokesperson told the BBC that police are still trying to ascertain the identity of the woman's husband, who charging documents describe as a co-conspirator.

There is no reward currently being offered for his arrest.

Three children were revived with Narcan, an overdose reversing drug, after police were called to the Divino Niño nursery in the Bronx on Friday night.

A search of the nursery turned up one kilo of fentanyl that was discovered "underneath a mat where the children had been sleeping earlier", said NYPD chief detective Joseph Kenny on Monday.

The owner of the Divino Niño nursery, Ms Mendez, 36, and her tenant, Carlisto Acevedo Brito, 41, are facing federal charges of narcotics possession "with intent to distribute resulting in death and conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death", according to federal prosecutors.

Surveillance footage and phone records show that Ms Mendez called her husband several times after finding the children ill - before she contacted 911. Her husband then arrived and removed several full shopping bags from the nursery, officials said.

Ms Mendez also allegedly deleted approximately 20,000 text messages from her phone before her arrest, according to prosecutors. Authorities were later able to recover them.

A lawyer for Ms Mendez said his client denies the charges and was unaware that drugs were being kept in the nursery.

Fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 50 times more powerful than heroin, has been blamed for a rise in US drug deaths.

Police say the drugs recovered from the nursery could have killed 500,000 people.

City health inspectors conducted a surprise visit of the nursery on 6 September, but did not identify any violations.

Mayor Eric Adams defended the inspectors on Wednesday, telling TV network NY1: "That inspector did their job. And we should not in any way give an impression that inspector failed those children and their families."

"Who did not do their job?" he asked. "Those individuals who were supposed to protect the children there."

The father of a two-year old boy that survived the fentanyl exposure told ABC News that there were warning flags about the nursery.

Jaziel Lino's father told the network that looking back, he considers it suspicious that there were three men standing outside the building on Thursday and Friday.

On Wednesday, in an unrelated case, NYPD officials announced that drugs and automatic weapons had been seized from a home in Queens where a young child lives.

The illicit items were recovered from a room across the hall from where the 10-year-old sleeps, they said.

"I don't know how anyone could think it's OK," Deputy Chief Jerry O'Sullivan said at a news conference to announce the result of the early morning raid.

Virtually every corner of the US, from Hawaii to Alaska to Rhode Island, has been touched by fentanyl, new research shows.

The death toll from fentanyl includes a growing number of very young children.

Over the weekend in Washington state, one child died and two others got sick in separate incidents involving fentanyl, police say.

Across the country, prosecutors are bringing charges against parents whose children died after consuming the deadly drug.

In 2010, less than 40,000 people died from a drug overdose across the country, and less than 10% of those deaths were tied to fentanyl.

By 2021, over 100,000 people had died annually in drug overdoses, with an estimated 66% of those tied to fentanyl.