David Brian Pearce, a Los Angeles man who lured women into his orbit by claiming he was a Hollywood producer, was sentenced Wednesday to 146 years for the fatal overdose of a model and her friend, as well as the sexual assaults of multiple women over 14 years.
Pearce, 43, was convicted in February on two counts of first-degree murder in the overdose deaths of 24-year-old model Christy Giles and 26-year-old Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola.
Prosecutors said the pair died in November 2021 after meeting the self-proclaimed entertainment bigwig at a warehouse party and returning to his Beverly Hills home, where they were served a fatal cocktail of fentanyl, cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs.
Some 12 hours later, the women were dumped outside two separate L.A.-area hospitals.
Giles was already dead when she was dropped off, prosecutors said. Cabrales-Arzola was found unresponsive and placed on life support, but died 11 days later — just one day short of her 27th birthday.
The coroner later ruled the deaths a homicide, with both women having died from “multiple drug intoxication” and Cabrales-Arzola also dying from multiple organ failure.
In addition to the murders, Pearce was also convicted on multiple counts of rape and sexual assault against seven different women between 2007 and 2021. Those included three counts of forcible rape, one count of sodomy by use of force and one count of sexual penetration by a foreign object, as well as other similar charges.
Many of those victims, who came forward following Pearce’s arrest in December of 2021, said he lured them to his apartment by pretending be a well-connected Hollywood insider, despite having no real credits to his name.
Pearce’s co-defendant in the case, actor Brandt Walter Osborn, is awaiting potential retrial after a previous jury couldn’t reach a verdict on two counts of being an accessory after the fact. Osborn has been accused of helping Pearce to drop the women off at the hospitals after they overdosed at the apartment the men shared.
