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In the last text that she sent her husband before her death, model Christy Giles said that she was partying with a friend and was heading to an industrial stretch of East Los Angeles where a rave was being held.
The message was “loving and affectionate,” said her husband, Jan Cilliers, who told The Post he received the text from his 24-year-old wife between midnight and 1 a.m. on Nov. 13.
Several hours later, Giles was dumped unconscious at a Culver City hospital, where she died of an overdose of fentanyl, cocaine, ketamine and GHB — the latter popularly known as the “date rape drug” because it’s sometimes used by assailants to knock out unwitting victims.
Giles’ friend, interior designer Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, was dumped at a different Los Angeles area hospital later the same day.
Cabrales-Arzola died of organ failure several days later, just shy of her 27th birthday, with cocaine, ecstasy and other undetermined drugs found in her system.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled both deaths homicides, and this week the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Hollywood producer and club promoter David Pearce, 40, with the women’s murders.
At a Tuesday press conference, DA George Gascón formally announced the murder charges and slapped Pearce with additional sexual assault charges in unrelated cases. Gascón said that seven additional women had come forward to report that the producer and party promoter had allegedly sexually assaulted them between 2010 and 2021. And there could be more women out there, the DA said, urging alleged victims to come forward.
Pearce is also facing two counts of selling or offering to sell a controlled substance to Giles and Cabrales-Arzola. He could face a maximum sentence of 120 years if convicted of all the charges, Gascón said.
Pearce has been in jail, held on $3.4 million bail, since December, charged with allegedly raping four women in unrelated cases.
“I’m really glad that the wheels of justice have started moving,” Cilliers told The Post Tuesday. “But there is no such thing as real justice in this case, because nothing is going to bring Christy back.”
Christy Lee Giles was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Nov. 4, 1997, and grew up with her two older sisters on a cul-de-sac in the suburb Mt. Olive, “where she ran laps in the dirt” in the backyard and “ate pancakes on Saturday mornings with her family,” according to an obituary.
Giles’ “first love” was soccer “where she got to use her untamed aggression and insane ability to run for hours without stopping,” the obituary said. As a teenager, she was on an All-State team and ran track as well. Encouraged by her great-grandmother, who would often go shopping with Giles for fancy dress-up gowns, she also competed in local beauty pageants and won titles of Junior Miss and Miss Gardendale Magnolia Festival, and was a first-runner-up at Miss Alabama Teen USA.
When Giles was 14, she attended her first modeling casting and received callbacks from 11 of the 13 modeling agencies that participated in the search. Two years later, she left school and began to travel the world as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, which has represented such famous names as Anjelica Huston, Beverly Johnson and Patti Hansen.
“She loved modeling, but also loved meeting new people and experiencing different cultures,” the obituary said of Giles, who eventually moved to Los Angeles.
In 2019, when she was 21 years old, she met Cilliers, who works as a visual effects supervisor in Hollywood. After “a whirlwind romance,” the couple eloped at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in August of that year.
“Christy experienced love that was deep, vulnerable, and inspirational,” said the obituary. “Christy and Jan spent their days together traveling the world, cooking dinners in their kitchen and snuggling with their cats.”
On the night of Nov. 12, 2021, Christy told Cilliers she was going to an art opening in Los Angeles with her friend, who they called Marcela. Cabrales-Arzola had graduated with an architectural degree from the Universidad de Monterrey, where her family lives. Cabrales-Arzola had recently moved to Los Angeles from her native Mexico, according to reports.
That night at the art studio, Giles used cocaine and ketamine and smoked marijuana, a friend told police, according to the affidavit by Los Angeles Police Department Detective Jonathan Vander Lee.
After the art affair, the two women headed to an industrial part of East Los Angeles, where a rave was being held in a large brick building that is used as a parking garage. It was at this point that Giles texted Cilliers, arriving at the venue just after 1 a.m.
At some point, the two women became separated at the rave. Cabrales-Arzola met Pearce and posed together for a picture with him taken by a wandering photographer at the event. The women met up again at 4:21 am when Cabrales-Aroza texted Giles: “Do you want coke?”
A friend of the women told police that she saw Pearce give both Cabrales-Arzola and Giles what looked like cocaine. Footage from security cameras shows them leaving the rave with Pearce and two other men: actor Brandt Osborn and video producer Michael Ansbach. They drove to Pearce and Osborn’s apartment on Olympic Blvd in Osborn’s Hyundai, arriving at 5:11 a.m.
But just 20 minutes later, something wasn’t right. Giles wanted to leave, and texted Cabrales-Arzola, “Let’s go,” adding a wide-eyed emoji.
Cabrales-Aroza texted that she would call an Uber. A car, believed by police to be the Uber, pulled up at the apartment building at 5:45 a.m. but left after waiting for five minutes, according to security camera footage from a nearby building.
Between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., downstairs neighbors said they heard the sounds of “someone in pain and moaning on and off,” according to police. At 4:19 p.m., Pearce is shown on video camera footage carrying Giles to his black Toyota Prius. The license plates had been removed from the car, and Pearce wore a mask, a hat and a hoodie. Accompanied by Osborn, he drove to the Southern California Medical Center in Culver City and dropped off Giles shortly after 5 p.m., telling medical staff that they were Good Samaritans who had found her “passed out on the curb,” according to Vander Lee.
Cilliers, who was in San Francisco at the time, noticed from a location-sharing app that Giles’ cellphone was “at a strange address that I did not recognize” when he woke up on Nov. 13.
“I was texting her throughout the day, and she was unresponsive to my messages, which caused me to be increasingly worried about her,” he told The Post. “When her phone moved locations around 5 p.m. to Culver City Hospital, I immediately called the emergency room there to see if I could find out what was going on. Also, at this point, I was on my way to the airport because I knew something bad was happening.”
He heard that his wife had died just before he boarded his flight to Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Pearce and Osborn returned to the apartment and, an hour later, Pearce was shown on video carrying a “partially clad” Cabrales down the stairs. They dropped her off at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles after 7 p.m.
Later that night, homicide detectives visited the apartment, where Osborn demanded to see a lawyer before answering questions, although he did deny on the spot that the women had done any drugs and said he went to bed after arriving home and didn’t wake up until the afternoon, according to reports.
Osborn claimed that he didn’t call an ambulance for the women because “we didn’t know them,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. Osborn did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.
They didn’t take Giles and Cabrales to the same hospital because “we didn’t know how that would look,” he said.
On Tue., July 5, 2022, Osborn was charged with being an accessory after the fact in the two murders. A warrant has gone out for the arrest of the 42-year-old actor, who has had guest roles on “Nurse Jackie” and “NCIS” as well as low-budget productions such as “Stock Broker” and “Obamaland Part 1: Rise of the Trumpublikans,” according to his IMDB profile. Osborn recently changed his name on his social media posts to Bobby Delfrati in what one source speculated was an attempt to distance himself from the case of the two murdered women, The Post has learned.
A third man, Michael Ansbach, was originally arrested with Osborn on suspicion of being an accessory in the deaths, but they were without charges two days after their arrests in December 2021. Ansbach, 47, was not charged Tuesday.
For his part, Pearce has denied any wrongdoing.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t do anything wrong, and obviously I’m not going to say anything that’s going to incriminate me,” he said, according to Vander Lee’s affidavit. He went on to say that he had “watched, you know, people partaking in things that I had nothing to do with and I just tried to make the situation, you know, right.”
In 2014, he was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, but prosecutors in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to bring charges, according to the affidavit.
And in 2020, another woman accused Pearce of rape. A deputy district attorney again chose not to charge him with a crime, and wrote in an internal memo that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the woman’s account of being raped while she was passed out, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Pearce’s lawyer Jacob Glucksman told The Post earlier this week that Pearce plans to plead not guilty at this arraignment Monday.
“All the allegations, including the new charges, are based on extremely weak evidence,” Glucksman said. “The DA’s office is prosecuting under the premise of ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ The problem is, they haven’t yet located any fire.
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