A one-year-old boy died and three other children were hospitalized after emergency workers responded to a report of cardiac arrest at a daycare center in New York City on Friday, authorities said.
Police said they found equipment often used in the production of illegal drugs in the home-based daycare in the Bronx. Police said they were investigating the possibility that both the dead child and the hospitalized children had been exposed to an opioid of some kind over an extended period of time, according to reports from WABC and the New York Times.
Nonetheless, police said the cause for the death and hospitalizations in question remained under investigation.
Officers learned of the emergency at the Divino Niño daycare about 2.40pm local time. They learned the children there had eaten and taken a nap, and some of them remained unconscious when workers went to wake them up.
One of those children, a boy named Nicholas Dominici, was pronounced dead. Two others (a two-year-old boy and an eight-month-old girl) were brought to the hospital.
A third child who was brought to the hospital – another two-year-old boy – had gone home from the daycare earlier but was taken to doctors because he was lethargic and unresponsive. The opioid reversal medication Narcan saved his life, WABC reported.
Fire department officials tested the air for environmental hazards such as carbon monoxide but found no evidence of that. Investigators then obtained a warrant to search the daycare center and found what is known as a kilo press, according to WABC’s report.
“This is an item that is commonly used by drug dealers when packaging large quantities of drugs,” Joseph Kenny, the New York police department’s chief of detectives, said in a news conference.
Dr Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, said authorities believed the children had somehow come in contact “with a powerful substance which can … intoxicate the recipient”. Nonetheless, Vasan said: “We don’t know what happened in this case” yet.
Edward Caban, the police commissioner, said, “We don’t know exactly what happened to those babies.”
The city’s medical examiner planned to conduct an autopsy of Dominici to determine his cause of death. The surviving children’s urine and blood would be taken to determine which substance they were exposed to.
The daycare had recently passed a city inspection. On Friday, two people running the daycare were being questioned and facing the possibility of charges, WABC reported.
As the Times noted, before Dominici’s death, another one-year-old boy in New York died of poisoning in February from a combination of fentanyl, acetyl fentanyl and cocaine. The boy’s death in Staten Island was ruled a homicide.
Meanwhile, in November 2021, the 10-month-old granddaughter of the novelist Paul Auster died of poisoning from fentanyl and heroin. Authorities charged the girl’s father with manslaughter, and he died of a drug overdose while the case was pending.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
