A Hollywood producer was sentenced on Wednesday to 146 years to life in prison for the 2021 Los Angeles fentanyl overdose deaths of 24-year-old Christy Giles and 26-year-old Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola.
David Brian Pearce, 43, has been behind bars since he was arrested in December 2021, after the two friends had spent their last hours together one month earlier in his Beverly Hills apartment. Their deaths were officially classified as homicides by the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner, with toxicology reports finding multiple drugs present in both victims’ systems.
In February this year, a jury found Pearce guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of the women.
Police reported earlier that on Nov. 13, 2021, masked men dumped the two women outside of two separate hospitals.
Giles, a model, was already dead when she was taken to a Culver City hospital, while Cabrales-Arzola, an architect, was alive outside a West Los Angeles Hospital but in critical condition. Her family took her off life support later that month, a day before her 27th birthday.
Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales
Jan Cilliers/Fernanda Cantisani
Pearce, called a “sexual predator” by prosecutors, met Giles and Cabrales-Arzola while with Brandt Osborn and Michael Ansbach at an East Los Angeles after-hours warehouse party on Nov. 13, 2021.
They all went back to Pearce’s Beverly Hills apartment, and while there, prosecutors said Pearce provided Giles, Cabrales-Arzola, and Ansbach gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and fentanyl.
Within about thirty-five minutes of arriving at the apartment, Cabrales-Arzola called a rideshare service to leave, but the women did not leave until about 11 hours later, when Pearce carried them out, and they were dropped off at two different hospitals.
During Pearce’s trial, prosecutors argued 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.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office reported that the death investigations uncovered that Pearce had committed numerous drug-induced sexual assaults against multiple women. “Seven victims testified at trial to Pearce’s sexual depravity and violent tendencies,” the DA’s Office wrote in a press release.
The jury also found Pearce guilty of various sexual assault charges involving crimes against seven women between 2007 and 2020, including 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.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on charges against co-defendant Osborn, 45, who was facing two counts of being an accessory after the fact.
A mistrial was declared on those charges after jurors said they were deadlocked. Osborn, now 46, is awaiting a potential retrial.