The mother of a 1-year-old boy who died after being exposed to fentanyl at a Bronx day care says she hopes the owner of the since-closed facility never gets to see her own children grow up.
Day care 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 day care were poisoned by the lethal opioid, which the owners stored in a nap room, officials said. Though the other children recovered, Nicholas died several days later, a tragedy Dominici said will shape the rest of her life.
“I almost never sleep well because I can’t close my eyes and (not) 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, Mendez started covering up the crimes, prosecutors said.
The call that day care manager Mendez should have placed to 911 was made to her husband, who rushed over to the day care center and later fled with two full shopping bags, officials said.
Authorities said he had collected incriminating evidence and later fled to Mexico, where he was captured.
“It was chilling to listen to the 911 call that Ms. Mendez finally made while screaming that the babies were not breathing, but while also directing her husband out the back door,” said Bronx Supreme Court Judge Margaret Clancy, who sentenced the day care owners. “On the day the babies became ill, both attendants put themselves first.”
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)
“It defies the understanding that these defendants, parents themselves, could begin and continue their fentanyl and drug operations while at the same time seeking licensing from the city to operate the day care for the care of our young children,” the judge said. “They continued to package and store fentanyl and other dangerous drugs in the very space where young children would be crawling, playing, sleeping and eating. No one can live in our community and not know the dangers of fentanyl.”
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 day care facility.
“My other children had never been to a day care 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 said she wished she could turn back time to watch the little boy playing in the park with his friends or climbing into his parents’ bed when he wouldn’t 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, she added.
“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 both apologized before they were sentenced.
“I know that, to them, saying I am sorry might not mean anything,” Herrera-Garcia said in a statement. “I know that, right, they might not be able to forgive me because it is too soon. But I do ask that, as time goes by, that they forgive us. I am sorry in a way that they cannot imagine.”
He also apologized to his wife, saying, “because of my fault, she’s here.”
“I just want to apologize to the family of the children that I was caring for,” Mendez said, while crying. “They said that I never apologized, but I have apologized, and to my family, as well.”
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.
