AURORA | A 25-year-old Aurora man has been indicted on more than a dozen felony charges in connection with the poisoning death and rape of a 16-year-old Lakewood girl in August.
The grand jury in the 18th Judicial District last month issued a 13-count indictment against Jorge Che-Quiab, including felony charges of first-degree murder, distribution of a controlled substance to a minor and sexual assault on a child, according to court documents. He made his first court appearance Nov. 23.
Investigators with Aurora police have accused Che-Quiab of hosting a party with several teenage girls at his apartment in the city’s Heather Ridge neighborhood the evening of Aug. 6 and into the early morning hours of Aug. 7, according to the indictment.
After initially denying his direct involvement in the death of one of the 16-year-old partygoers, he eventually admitted to police that he sold the teen multiple pills containing the powerful opiate fentanyl under the guise the capsules contained the far less potent narcotic Oxycodone. He also provided the group with additional alcohol and cocaine.
Che-Quiab told Aurora detectives that the 16-year-old began to lose consciousness and vomited after she ingested the crushed up fentanyl pills, though he did not address her deteriorating condition until the morning.
“He had said that he should have taken her to the ER ‘because she was limp’ but he didn’t and instead went to sleep,” according to the indictment.
Che-Quiab eventually called 911 at about 9:30 a.m. the next morning, he told authorities in an initial interview.
The Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office in September found that the girl died from a mixture of alcohol and fentanyl poisoning.
In a later interview, Che-Quiab admitted that he also had sex with one of the teenagers at the gathering. He said he saw other people at his apartment also engaging in lascivious activity with unconscious girls, though he provided investigators with relatively few details.
One 14-year-old who was at Che-Quiab’s apartment that night told a forensics investigator that she lost consciousness after drinking about half a bottle of hard liquor.
“She described waking up with her underwear off, her pants were on backward, and noticing that the money she had kept in her bra was not there,” the indictment reads.
The girl who died was also assaulted at some point during the gathering.
Upon executing a search warrant at Che-Quiab’s home on South Quentin Way, Aurora authorities found several hundred grams of heroin and nearly 300 blue pills that had been pressed to look like prescription Oxycodone, but were cut with fentantyl. Police also found a Mexican passport for Che-Quiab, and he later told investigators that he had been involved in gangs in the past.
“Recently, narcotics law enforcement officers and task force agents have seen dealers pressing fentanyl to resemble 30 milligram, blue oxycodone pills in order to make more profit,” according to the indictment.
District Attorney George Brauchler condemned that recent trend.
“It is incredibly concerning that unsuspecting drug users could inadvertently be consuming fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than oxycodone,” Brauchler said in a statement. “In this case, we have a juvenile victim who was given what she thought was ‘oxy,’ and she is dead from a fentanyl overdose. This is a warning to illegal drug users: The risk cannot be overstated, and it is death.”
Che-Quiab is currently incarcerated at the Arapahoe County jail in lieu of posting a $2 million bond. He is set to appear next in court at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 9.