A 42-year-old Hollywood wannabe has reportedly been arrested on the set of NCIS: Los Angeles in connection with the mysterious deaths of a 24-year-old Instagram model and her friend.
Brandt Osborn, who originally hails from Staten Island, was one of three men arrested Wednesday over the November deaths of Christy Giles and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed Thursday. David Pearce, 37, and Michael Ansbach, 47, were identified as the other two men taken into custody Wednesday. Pearce faces a manslaughter charge, while Ansbach and Osborn are charged with accessory to manslaughter, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“It is believed that both women were given drugs and overdosed,” the police department said in a press release that warned “there could be other victims.”
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Giles’ lifeless body was found dumped on the sidewalk of a Los Angeles area hospital after she had attended a warehouse party with friends in mid-November. Cabrales-Arzola, a 26-year-old interior designer, was also dropped off at another L.A.-area hospital, and she initially survived, but was taken off life support weeks later when it was determined she was brain dead.
The arrests were first reported by the New York Post.
Inmate records for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department show Osborn was booked on Wednesday for a felony charge and is being held on $100,000 bail. Pearce and Ansbach were also listed with the same booking date and felony charge.
No further details were immediately available on the allegations against the men.
Giles’ husband, Jan Cilliers, told The Daily Beast on Thursday that he is “happy the arrests got made.”
“But I know that this is just the beginning of the battle, and we have a long fight ahead of us,” Cilliers said. “We are also looking for more victims to come forward that may previously have been harmed or affected by these men.”
Osborn is said to have openly spoken to fellow actors about Giles’ death last month, boasting about “the craziest weekend of my life” at a shoot, actor David Murrietta Jr. told the Post.
“He told me how they’d partied, two girls came back to their place, and the girls had a bunch of drugs,” Murrietta was quoted as saying.
He recalled Osborn saying he’d left the residence and returned to have his roommate tell him Giles had died.
“He checked her pulse, freaked out, decided not to call 911, and they decided what to do with the body,” he said, per the Post.
In a bombshell interview with the Daily Mail, actor Steven Bauer, who played Cuban drug kingpin Manny Ribera in the 1983 film Scarface, said he saw Pearce rape a woman at a Beverly Hills house party in 2008.
“He was trying to hustle me out of the party so that nobody else would hear,” Bauer told the outlet. “He said, ‘Don’t listen to her. This is a stupid party, let’s get out of here… Get in the car, get in the car.’”
Pierce was also accused by former Scorpions bassist Ralph Rieckermann of keeping a “stack of women’s IDs in his apartment which he handed out to young girls, as well as dozens of credit cards not in his name and several high-end laptops.”
Osborn’s IMDB profile lists credits for Nurse Jackie, in which he apparently appeared in an episode as the best man of the main character’s husband, and the 2012 film Ruse, for which he worked in the sound department.
Investigators have been looking into the circumstances surrounding the women’s deaths since the two were first found dumped outside hospitals after a fun night out with friends. Both their families have publicly made clear they suspected foul play.
In the wake of Giles’ death, Cilliers told local news outlet KABC he had been text messaging with her in the hours before her death, and it was apparently her decision to leave the warehouse party that night that proved fatal.
“I’ve got all the messages that she exchanged with anybody else that night and she was texting Marcela, the girl that she was with, at 5:30 saying let’s get out of here with the wide eye emoji,” he said.
