The mother of a 1-year-old boy who died after being exposed to fentanyl at a Bronx daycare says she hopes the owner of the facility never gets to see her own children grow up.
Daycare owners Grei Mendez and her husband Felix Herrera-Garcia were each sentenced Tuesday to 25 years to life in prison for the September 2023 murder.
”The justice that Nicholas deserves is that this woman, whose name I find difficult to bear, never gets out of jail, that she never sees her children grow up, because she took mine from me,” Zoila Dominici said in Spanish in Bronx Supreme Court.
“Nicholas didn’t deserve to die — she’s the one who should have died. And every day I ask God to punish her with the worst punishment on earth because she messed with the most sacred thing one has in life: one’s children. Nicholas deserves true justice because absolutely nothing will bring him back to my arms.”
Sheetal Banchariya / New York Daily News
Otoniel Feliz and Zoila Dominici hold a picture of their son, Nicholas Dominici, who lost his life to fentanyl exposure at a Bronx daycare in 2023, outside the Bronx Hall of Justice on Wednesday. (Sheetal Banchariya / New York Daily News)
Prosecutors said the owners of Divino Nino Day Care on Morris Ave. near E. 196th St. ran a fentanyl-trafficking operation at the same location where trusting parents like Dominici dropped off their sons and daughters every day.
Nicholas and three of his playmates at the daycare were poisoned by the lethal opioid, which the owners stored in a nap room, officials said. While the other children recovered, Nicholas died several days later, a tragedy Dominici said will shape the rest of her life.
“I can’t close my eyes and see my son lying in that hospital bed with blood in his mouth, unresponsive,” Dominici said. “I spoke to him, I called him, I kissed him, I begged him to wake up. And he didn’t wake up. My son was still warm. I opened his beautiful eyes with my fingers and he didn’t wake up. I touched his little hands, and nothing. Since that day, our lives have never been the same.”
Instead of immediately seeking help for the children, prosecutors said Mendez started covering up the crimes.
The call that Mendez should have placed to 911 was made to her husband, who rushed over to the El Divino Nino daycare center and fled later with two full shopping bags, officials said.
Authorities said he had collected incriminating evidence and later fled to Mexico where he was captured.
Sam Costanza for New York Daily News
Police respond to the Divino Nino Day Care on Morris Ave. in the Bronx on September 15, 2023. (Sam Costanza for New York Daily News)
In November 2025, a jury found both Herrera Garcia and Grei Mendez guilty of murder and assault charges.
Dominici said Nicholas was the first of her children to ever be dropped off at a facility.
“My other children had never been to a daycare center,” the mother said.”They were born in Santo Domingo and went straight to school when they arrived. Nicholas was the first to go to one.”
Dominici wishes she could turn back time to watch him playing in the park with his little friends or climbing into his parents’ bed when he wouldnt stay in his crib.
Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News
Felix Herrera-Garcia, left, and Grei Mendez. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
She was robbed of the joy of seeing him learn to ride a bike or go to school.
“I wasn’t so lucky,” she said. “Today, Nicholas is in a cold cemetery, far from me, from the mother who brought him into the world to see him do all that. And all because someone I entrusted my son to didn’t care about the lives of those innocent children, children who are precious to their parents.”
Mendez and Herrera-Garcia were both previously sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2024 to federal charges of drug possession and distribution inside a child care center.