Regulators never alerted after 23-year-old ODs at Brooklyn Mirage

Hours before Genesis Reynoso’s death, she sent a note to an acquaintance — a man operating a food truck outside the Brooklyn Mirage, a music venue in industrial East Williamsburg. She offered to pay him for “E” and “molly,” different forms of the drug known as MDMA.

By the end of the night, Reynoso would be transported from the Mirage by ambulance for an apparent drug overdose. Medical records show she was admitted to the hospital between 1 and 2 a.m. on Oct. 4, 2021. She went into cardiac arrest four different times over the coming hours, which robbed her of her brain function. At 7:02 that evening, she was pronounced dead. She was just 23 years old.

At the time, both the Mirage and Avant Gardner, the larger event space that it’s a part of, were under intense scrutiny from the State Liquor Authority that was threatening the venue's future. The regulator — which controls the licenses that allow bars, restaurants and entertainment venues that sell alcohol — had raised myriad concerns over the previous year about what it called “rampant” drug use at the venue, including two prior overdose deaths in 2017 and 2018.

But the State Liquor Authority wasn’t made aware of Reynoso’s death at the time – in part because no one called 911 that night. Instead, she was transported to the hospital by a private ambulance the Mirage had on standby, which left no paper trail for state liquor regulators. An independent monitor assigned to the venue didn’t start its work for another month. And liquor regulators said they only learned of Reynoso’s case in March of this year, when Gothamist first inquired about it.

The only reason any police report exists at all is because Reynoso's aunt, Cynthia Angel, went to the local precinct and filed one. In the report, the NYPD noted that the medical examiner deemed her death “suspicious”.

As the second anniversary of Reynoso’s death approaches, her family members said they’re frustrated by what they see as a lack of accountability on the part of the Mirage's owners, and on the part of the NYPD, which they believe should have investigated her death more vigorously.

For more, visit Gothamist.com.