Wild Night Turns Tragic: 2 Young Women Dead of Overdoses, a Hollywood Producer Charged with Double Murder

In 2021, with her husband visiting family in San Francisco, Los Angeles-based model Christy Giles was looking forward to a girls’ night out with her friend, interior designer and architect Hilda Cabrales-Arzola.

On Nov. 12, 2021, Giles, 24, and Cabrales-Arzola, 26, started out at Soho House in West Hollywood before moving on at 1 a.m. to an all-night dance party at an East L.A. warehouse where their favorite DJ was playing. 

Upbeat and fun-loving, Giles “knew how to live in the moment,” her husband, Jan Cilliers, 44, a visual-effects supervisor, told PEOPLE previously. 

Just before 5 a.m. the women headed to the Olympic Boulevard apartment of two men they met at the warehouse, presumably to keep the party going.

But something seemed amiss when they got there. “Christy and Hilda tried to leave,” Cilliers said. “They called an Uber. And whatever happened in the following 12 hours left them dead.” 

Exactly what transpired at the afterparty is the key question being asked at the trial of the two men they met: aspiring Hollywood producer David Pearce, 42, and his roommate, actor Brandt Osborn, 45. 

During opening arguments in an L.A. courtroom on Jan. 9, prosecutors claimed Pearce gave the women a lethal mix of drugs, including cocaine and fentanyl and, in Giles’s case, the date-rape drug GHB, before dropping the women off, barely alive, with Osborn at separate L.A. hospitals. 

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Giles was pronounced dead of an overdose at the hospital. Cabrales-Arzola clung to life for more than a week, dying of multiple organ failure the day before her 27th birthday. 

Pearce is charged with murder and Osborn is charged with being an accessory to the crime after the fact for helping to clandestinely transport the victims to the hospitals. Both have pleaded not guilty. 

Pearce is also being tried for seven counts of sexual assault from 2007 to 2021. 

While prosecutors told jurors the women died because of drugs Pearce gave them, Pearce’s defense attorney Jeff Voll argued that the women were responsible for their own deaths. 

“The evidence will show that these young ladies unfortunately ingested fentanyl, and they died,” he told jurors on Jan. 9. “But not at the hands of Mr. Osborn or Mr. Pearce.” 

Uneasy texts exchanged between the women shed light on their last moments, prosecutors say. 

At 5:30 a.m., 20 minutes after arriving at Pearce and Osborn’s apartment, Giles texted Cabrales-Arzola, “Let’s go,” with a wide-eyed emoji. At 5:31 a.m. she responded, “Yes. I’ll call an Uber. 10 min away.” 

Doorbell video shows the Uber leaving empty when nobody came to claim it, L.A. Deputy District Attorney Catherine Mariano said in her opening arguments.

Photographer Michael Ansbach was at the apartment that morning and alleges that Pearce gave him and the two women alcoholic drinks and cocaine laced with fentanyl, Mariano alleged in her opening statement.

Even though the women had consumed alcohol and drugs before getting there, Mariano alleged, the drugs Pearce gave them at the apartment are what “ultimately killed them.”

In court, Mariano claimed the men did not immediately seek help because, as Pearce allegedly told his roommate, “Dead girls don’t talk.” 

At 5 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2021, nearly 12 hours after the women got to the apartment, Pearce and Osborn dropped Giles off at the hospital, saying they were “Good Samaritans” who found her unconscious “on a curb,” according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by PEOPLE.

Two hours later, Cabrales-Arzola was left at a Mid City hospital by the same two men. 

In his opening statement, Voll told jurors about recently uncovered evidence: a locket with a small spoon worn by Giles on the day of her death that tested positive for fentanyl—“their own fentanyl.”

Still grieving the loss of his wife, Cilliers said he is ready to fight for her. “This is just the beginning of the battle,” he said. “Even though no amount of justice is ever going to bring her back, hopefully it stops these guys from doing anything else to any other woman.”