The case of friends Christy Giles and Hilda Cabrales Arzola rocked Los Angeles County for weeks last winter.

Giles' lifeless body was taken to a hospital in Culver City at the time, and hours later Arzola's body was taken to a hospital in west Los Angeles.

Giles, a 24-year-old model, died later that night.

Arzola, a 26-year-old architect, was in a coma for 11 days before her organs failed.

The autopsy showed that the friends had consumed cocaine, fentanyl and other intoxicants before they passed out.

Photos showed both at a celebration at a warehouse in East Los Angeles the night before the overdose.

At her side: 40-year-old David Pearce, a cameraman and producer.

murder charge brought

The Los Angeles Police Department later determined that Pearce was one of the masked men who took Giles and Arzola to the hospital in an unlicensed car in mid-November.

Now, almost eight months after the alleged crime, prosecutors have brought murder charges against Pearce.

The actor Brandt Osborn, known from the crime series "NCIS: Los Angeles" has to answer for aiding and abetting after driving to the hospitals together.

The late indictment is just as puzzling as the circumstances of the crime.

Pearce, Osborn and an alleged accomplice, cameraman Michael "Mike" Ansbach, were arrested weeks after Giles and Arzola's deaths.

It quickly became clear that Pearce and Ansbach had not only brought the lifeless bodies of the two to the hospital, as initially claimed.

According to the investigative report, after the celebration in East Los Angeles, Giles and Arzola drove with the two to their apartment on Olympic Boulevard in the west of the city.

The party continued there.

The women, who, according to their families, occasionally used drugs, are said to have used cocaine there.

For reasons that have not yet been clarified, they suddenly wanted to say goodbye.

"I order an Uber.

The car will be here in 10 minutes,” Arzola texted her friend Giles in the next room.

A security camera caught the driver waiting on Olympic Boulevard for a few minutes around 5:30 a.m. without Arzola and Giles getting on.

About eleven hours later, Pearce and Ansbach rushed the unconscious Giles to the hospital.

What happened in the meantime and has now resulted in a murder charge remains unclear for the time being.

The public prosecutor's office also keeps to itself why months passed after the arrest of the alleged perpetrators and the search of their mobile phones, laptops and tablets before charges were brought.

Pearce is already awaiting the second criminal trial in prison.

As it became known a few weeks after the death of his friends, he is said to have brutally raped or abused at least four women in Los Angeles between 2010 and 2020.

Whether the Causa Giles-Arzola belongs to the alleged series of rapes is left open by the district attorney's office.

The investigation is still ongoing and "sensitive," her spokesman Greg Risling told the Los Angeles Times.