The two North Carolina men accused of drugging and raping a 24-year-old female tourist during spring break in Miami Beach earlier this year are now facing first-degree murder charges.
Evoire Collier, 21, and Dorian Taylor, 25, both from Greensboro, were found this week by a grand jury in Miami-Dade County to be responsible for the fentanyl-induced death of Christine Englehardt of Richboro, Pa., on March 18. Both men remain jailed in Miami.
Englehardt met the men while visiting South Beach and went with them to her room at the Albion Hotel, prosecutors said, before she later was found dead.
Evoire Collier, center, and Dorian Taylor are now facing murder charges in the death of Christine Englehardt.
((Englehardt family; Miami Beach Police))
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A three-page grand jury report accuses the pair of killing Englehardt with their “unlawful distribution of fentanyl” while committing sexual battery and burglary. The men allegedly took Englehardt’s credit cards and made illegal purchases at SOBE Liquors and the Sugar Factory.
Authorities said surveillance video captured the men entering the hotel with Englehardt and afterwards, leaving without her. An arrest report says Collier confessed to giving Englehardt a green pill and claimed they sexually assaulted her in the hotel room even as she lay unconscious.
The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner determined the pills ingested by Englehardt were “rapidly fatal” fentanyl. The autopsy also found that her blood alcohol level when she died hovered near 0.2%, almost three times the legal limit to drive, the Miami Herald reported.
According to Englehardt’s Facebook page, she was the assistant manager at Jules Thin Crust, a pizza shop in Philadelphia.
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In July, the medical examiner said Englehardt died from “prone positioning,” or facedown, “while under the influence of fentanyl and ethanol,” People magazine reported.
“Although the concentration of fentanyl detected is fatal, a component of positional asphyxia, with her face pressed down into soft bedding as a result of physical restraint and/or chemical impairment to facilitate sexual assault, cannot be excluded,” the medical examiner stated at the time.
But Collier’s attorney, Phil Reizenstein, told the Miami Herald he’s “stunned” by the murder indictment.
He argues that the medical examiner found Englehardt had ingested so many different drugs that it was nearly impossible to pin down what caused her death.
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“I think they’re going to regret doing this,” said Reizenstein. “I think by the time I’m finished with them, they’re never going to be able to say she died of this.”
The grand jury also added a second first-degree murder charge against Taylor for supplying the same opioid to Walter Riley, 21, from Chicago. He was found unconscious on a nearby street and died March 20, two days after Englehardt was found unresponsive in her hotel room, the Miami Herald reported.
Fox News’ Bradford Betz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
