warm anecdotes. They know it’s what they have to do. Otherwise, the media will con-
tinue “making her out to be some girl who was pregnant, who was a drug addict, who
had no clothes on, who was in the Bronx,” Maya said.
Many of McHenry’s friends won’t talk publicly about her partying or substance
abuse. After her ex-boyfriend briefly described McHenry developing a cocaine addic-
tion to the New York Times, he refused to give any more interviews. Speaking to ELLE,
Maya said she began to notice McHenry experimenting with drugs after college, but
only on special occasions. She denied her sister ever needed help, but stopped short
of denying McHenry had a problem.
“I always feel like it’s a problem when anybody’s doing drugs. It changes you. It
makes you say and do things you wouldn’t do in your normal state of mind. It makes
you feel like you’re invincible, and you already feel like that when you’re young,” Maya
said. “We feel like we’re invincible, and we can experiment and go so hard and nothing
will ever happen to us.”
Two weeks after McHenry’s death, the NYPD asked for the public’s help in identi-
fying a man captured on a surveillance camera the night of her death. It’s a blurry,
unremarkable clip: The man is wearing a black polo with white trim, standing on a
sidewalk with his hands in his pants pockets. He looks around, swaggers a few steps
forward, then turns and rubs his chin, inadvertently flashing a sleek watch and fade
haircut at the camera.
About two months later, 29-year-old Alexis Mejia-Ramirez walked into a police
department in the Bronx, where he lived. He told a detective he was sorry it took so
long to turn himself in—he was scared. He was arrested and charged with conceal-
ment of a human corpse and evidence tampering. (He later pleaded not guilty to both.)
According to authorities, after McHenry descended from the rooftop club on
the night of her birthday party, Mejia-Ramirez and two other men picked her up in
a car outside the Dream. The next time she was seen was on her back on the Bronx
overpass sidewalk. As of press time, the two other men in the car haven’t been pub-
licly identified.
Pretty much everyone agrees McHenry and Mejia-Ramirez weren’t acquainted;
her friends told reporters they didn’t recognize him, and Mejia-Ramirez’s attorney,
Frank Rothman, said they had no prior relation. While the McHenry family has
described the three men in the car as “drug dealers,” Mejia-Ramirez has not been
charged with a drug crime. (He also has no prior arrests in New York, the NYPD said.)
How he and McHenry met—and the precise events that unfolded during their car
ride—will likely remain a mystery until Mejia-Ramirez’s trial later this year. For now,
Maya said she believes that while McHenry willingly got into the car to take drugs
with the alleged dealers, no one told her she was taking heroin.
“I know my sister, and I know that she has experimented with drugs,” she said.
“But my sister would never experiment with heroin. Never. Ever. Literally, if someone
was talking about heroin in front of her, she’d be like, ‘Ew.’”
McHenry’s story is significant because of who she was: semifamous, privileged,
well-educated, socially conscious, full of creative promise, a mentor to many, and on
and on. She’s not the typical opioid overdose victim portrayed in the media—poor,
white, rural, hooked on pain pills. But her death is not unique. According to the CDC,
fatal drug overdoses have doubled over the last decade, claiming more than 70,200
Americans in 2017.
With more overdoses have come more abandoned bodies, dumped or left behind
by friends, family members, or dealers afraid of getting busted themselves—and
not just for possession or distribution. In response to the opioid crisis, the federal
government and many states have begun filing drug-induced homicide and other
related charges against anyone who provides drugs that result in someone else’s
death. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2016 there were 1,178 news articles
published about people facing drug-induced homicide charges. Five years earlier, in
2011, there were just 363.
In a case filled with unanswered questions, perhaps the most important one is
this: Was McHenry still alive when she was dumped in the Bronx? When she hit the
sidewalk, was her heart still beating? And if it was, are the men who dumped her
responsible for her death?
These questions rely heavily on knowing McHenry’s time of death—something
that prosecutors haven’t yet been able to prove in court, according to Rothman.
I
This information is vital to the case against him. Mejia-
Ramirez is charged with concealment of a corpse.
If McHenry was still alive when she was abandoned,
then she wasn’t a corpse, and the charge doesn’t neces-
sarily stick.
“I don’t believe she was deceased when she was first
put there,” Rothman said. But if McHenry was still alive,
that also means she could have been saved.
For Maya, there’s no question the three men in the
car are responsible, regardless of the circumstances—
whether McHenry knew what drug she was taking, or
even what time she died. Maya believes there had to
be a moment before her sister passed that some kind
of medical intervention was possible.
“You didn’t get her help. You could have saved her,
but you chose not to. So yeah, they killed her,” Maya
said. “They were just thinking of themselves at that
point: ‘Oh no, what’s gonna happen to me?’”
Rothman called McHenry’s overdose tragic. “But
the idea that [Mejia-Ramirez] is legally responsible, or
that he covered it up...to me is ridiculous. And I think
it’s a product of pressure that law enforcement felt to
do something because of who she was. That’s why he
found himself in handcuffs.”
McHenry’s lifestyle and status has played a compli-
cated role in her death. It’s made her a tabloid story. It
also may have, as Rothman suggested, encouraged pros-
ecutors to put more resources into getting justice for
her. (The Bronx DA declined to comment for this story.)
“The scenario of someone overdosing and essen-
tially being left is all too common and rarely prosecut-
ed,” said Lindsay LaSalle, the Drug Policy Alliance’s
director of public health law and policy. “Quite frankly,
if this was a homeless person or a sex worker, this kind
of prosecution would never occur. To me, it’s just an
indication of our perception of who uses drugs.”
t’s been almost a year since McHenry died. And
while Mejia-Ramirez attends court hearings and
the police work toward apprehending the other
two men allegedly present during McHenry’s
overdose, her loved ones have continued trying to
protect her image. It’s why they stick to the same lines
about her partying and pregnancy. They don’t want her
defined by the ugly way she died—this event that took
her from microfamous to infamous—or the secrets that
emerged when she did.
They want people to understand that the night
McHenry died, she wasn’t spiraling or strung out. She
hadn’t hit rock bottom. She wasn’t a mess. She was
happy. She was quick and ambitious and lit rooms on
fire with her warmth. Earlier that day, she had called
Rob Franklin to invite him out to the club. He said no,
he was too tired. But he remembered her voice, the last
time he heard it, as high-spirited.
There was a moment, in the horrifying, surreal min-
utes after she learned her sister had died, that a thought
occurred to Maya: Thank God. Thank God they weren’t
in an argument or a bad place in their relationship.
“Lyric was in such a good, mentally and emotionally
healthy, state of mind at that time in her life,” she said.
“Thank God that her last moments were good.”
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