The mystery surrounding the August death of a Los Angeles woman who vanished while celebrating her birthday in Manhattan has moved closer to being resolved.
A lethal mix of heroin, cocaine and alcohol killed 26-year-old Lyric McHenry, according to a criminal complaint against Alexis Mejia-Ramirez, charging him with concealing her corpse and tampering with evidence.
The 29-year-old Bronx man allegedly dumped McHenry’s body on a Bronx street after she overdosed, the complaint says. He was arrested October 15th and was held until Saturday, when he posted bail and was released, according to public records. He does not have a criminal record.
Mejia-Ramirez appeared in State Supreme Court in the Bronx Wednesday for a brief hearing on the status of the case against him. Assistant District Attorney Christina Scaccia said the prosecution’s evidence was fully presented to a Grand Jury, which would soon decide whether to indict.
Mejia-Ramirez himself declined to answer questions as he left court after the brief hearing. Instead, he covered his face and hustled quickly out of the courthouse with a female companion. But Franklin Rothman, Mejia-Ramirez’s lawyer, said the charges were baseless.
“It’s a tragic death, but he shouldn’t be charged with a crime. How do you conceal a corpse by leaving it on a street in the Bronx? They don’t even know what time she died,” Rothman said.
Edna Sims Porter, a spokesperson for the McHenry family, declined to comment Wednesday.
Two more men allegedly helped Mejia-Ramirez place McHenry’s body on the street, according to the criminal complaint. They are being sought by police, who know their nicknames, a law enforcement official told Gothamist Wednesday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
McHenry was celebrating her 26th birthday with friends at the Dream Hotel Downtown in Manhattan on August 14th when she vanished after midnight with a then-unknown man who the official now said was Mejia-Ramirez.
Her body was discovered by police later that morning, just after 5 a.m., in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. The official said license plate readers, cellphone records and witnesses tracked the white BMW used by McHenry and the other men to the Bronx.
Though no obvious signs of trauma were observed, McHenry was “unconscious and unresponsive,” the NYPD said in a news release at the time. Efforts to revive her were not successful, and she was pronounced dead at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, the NYPD said.
Although a police source said a bag containing what appeared to be cocaine was found beside McHenry, no cause of death was immediately apparent, and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had to conduct a weeks’ long investigation to uncover it.
McHenry was the daughter of Doug McHenry, a movie director and producer, and her mother is a wardrobe stylist, according to the New York Times. She attended Marlborough, an elite girls’ school in Los Angeles, before graduating Stanford in 2014 and moving to New York. The Times reports that she had recently moved back to L.A.
Here, McHenry appeared on EJNYC, a reality TV show produced by a childhood friend, Magic Johnson’s son EJ. She also produced video for the website Refinery29, and was working on a script, the Times reported.
She was 20 weeks pregnant at the time of her death, officials said, but friends and family say she may not have known it.
In an interview with the NY Times, Doug McHenry said he had seen the video of his daughter leaving the hotel in a white car, "The video shows she looked into the car, then she left, then she came back. There was a hesitancy there."
A former long-term boyfriend had previously told the NY Times that "her addiction was starting to really solidify and escalate" after she moved to New York. Her family does not believe McHenry was addicted, but sister Maya said, "She partied like everybody else parties. I think it was getting a little bit out of control, but that’s just because we live in 2018 now."
No one has yet been charged with causing McHenry’s death.
