The woman in the hotel security camera video showing the final hours of a sports reporter’s life needed no introduction.
For a group of men who said they had in recent years been drugged, robbed of tens of thousands of dollars, and had their identities stolen on nights out in New Orleans, the name of Danette Colbert, who was charged with murdering Adan Manzano, had tormented them for years.
Now, with the death of Mr. Manzano, a reporter for Telemundo Kansas City who had been in town covering the Super Bowl, it was front-page news. The text chain the men had started as a kind of virtual support group erupted with relief, as well as frustration that it had come to this.
“She finally went too far,” David Butler, 52, wrote on Feb. 7, linking to an article about Mr. Manzano’s death.
One of the men replied: “So she didn’t get any time after the trial you testified in?”
One of the men had come to town on a guys’ trip. Another was visiting family. A renovation project brought another to New Orleans, where the men say they became Ms. Colbert’s victims. Over the years, they said, they had reported her to law enforcement and spent hundreds of hours trying to repair damage to their finances.
Still, Ms. Colbert, 48, had been on probation at the time of Mr. Manzano’s death — despite having twice been charged in connection with similar scams on the Las Vegas Strip. (Both of those cases were dismissed.)
Days before Mr. Manzano was supposed to cover the Super Bowl for Telemundo Kansas City, his co-workers called his hotel for a wellness check after he missed an appointment. His body was found in his room on Feb. 5, the police said, with his phone and a credit card missing. They had been stolen by Ms. Colbert, according to the authorities, who said that she had been involved in similar schemes in New Orleans. This week, preliminary autopsy findings showed that the 27-year-old Mr. Manzano had died from the toxic effects of Xanax and alcohol, in addition to positional asphyxia. He was found facedown against a pillow.
Investigators said on Tuesday that they had also found Xanax at Ms. Colbert’s home the day after Mr. Manzano’s death, and that she had commonly used it to drug victims. They charged her with second-degree murder, which in Louisiana carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Mr. Butler said his ordeal began more than three years ago — in the early morning hours of Nov. 6, 2021, when he had gone out to the French Quarter to take a break from renovating a house not far from the nightlife district.
Ms. Colbert and another woman approached him outside a bar on Bourbon Street and asked whether he wanted to join them, he recalled in a victim impact statement and in interviews. He took them up on the offer. But after leaving his first drink unattended to buy a second round and coming back to finish it, he said, something felt off.
“Within minutes, I started feeling very strange, woozy, a feeling like the world around me was going dark,” Mr. Butler said.
His memory of what happened next is fuzzy: He recalled Ms. Colbert pushing him into a waiting taxi with her, he said, and about 12 hours later, a property manager at the home he was renovating shaking him awake as he lay on a mattress.
“He said he thought I was dead,” Mr. Butler said.
His wallet and phone were missing, but he still had his laptop, which had been buried under a pile of clothes. When he opened it and saw a torrent of fraud alerts, panic overcame him.
One alert: $85,000 in Bitcoin and Ethereum funds had been transferred from his Coinbase cryptocurrency wallet to an account, QUEENTX100. He said that a Google search of that name led him to a Facebook page for Ms. Colbert, whose photos he recognized. Other alerts showed an attempt to withdraw an additional $50,000 from his Chase bank account, and to make purchases totaling thousands of dollars at stores, including Walmart and Best Buy, using his credit cards, he said.
He went to the authorities the next day. His case bounced between detectives before Ms. Colbert was arrested in 2023. Nearly three years after that night — after Mr. Butler gathered mountains of paperwork for investigators and credit card companies — a jury in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court convicted Ms. Colbert last October of several felonies. During the trial, a lawyer for Ms. Colbert argued that Mr. Butler had paid her the money for sex, which he denied. Judge Nandi F. Campbell ordered Ms. Colbert to pay $50,000 in restitution to Mr. Butler, but Ms. Colbert received a 10-year suspended sentence and probation instead of jail time, court records show.
“I told the judge, I told the D.A., that she was going to kill somebody,” said Mr. Butler, who requested that other identifying information about him not be published, including where he lives and his occupation.
Keith D. Lampkin, a spokesman for the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, said that the prosecutor’s office filed a motion to revoke the sentence of probation Ms. Colbert received after learning of her recent arrest in Mr. Manzano’s death.
Representatives for Judge Campbell did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the lawyer who represented Ms. Colbert in the earlier case or her current lawyer.
Daniel Lippmann, who represented Ms. Colbert in the two Las Vegas cases from 2022, said that the alleged victims in those cases had failed to show up in court for preliminary hearings.
In the months that followed his ordeal, Mr. Butler began to search online for clues about what had happened to him, and discovered other men sharing similar experiences on Reddit. He tracked them down and started a group text chain. They said they had something — rather, someone — in common: Ms. Colbert.
There was Jason Egle, 50, a registered nurse who grew up near New Orleans, who had taken his nephew to a bar in the French Quarter to hear jazz in October 2021, he said in an interview.
He had some beers and shots, nothing he couldn’t handle, he said, but felt heavily impaired as he left the bar.
“I couldn’t even walk,” Mr. Egle said. “I could barely see.”
Mr. Egle said that he had called an Uber, and a black Mustang pulled up almost immediately. “She was the driver,” he said of Ms. Colbert. But there had been some confusion about whether he and his nephew had gotten into the right car, so, he said, Ms. Colbert asked to see his Uber app.
That is when Mr. Egle said he let his guard down and gave Ms. Colbert the code to unlock his phone, the same one for the password keychain for various apps, including those for his financial accounts. Not long after that, he said, Ms. Colbert told him that he had gotten into the wrong car and handed him back a phone — but it was not his. He did not immediately notice the switch because the battery was dead, he said.
Mr. Egle said Ms. Colbert had gotten into his cryptocurrency account and withdrawn about $15,000.
Mr. Egle provided The New York Times a copy of an online police report that he said that he filed with the New Orleans Police Department in October 2021 and a brief email exchange with an F.B.I. special agent in New Orleans in April 2022. Neither law enforcement agency, he said, followed up with him.
The New Orleans Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I.’s field office in New Orleans said that it was the bureau’s policy to neither confirm nor deny that it was conducting an investigation.
Ms. Colbert never had a driver account on Uber, said Sarah Casasnovas, a spokeswoman for the ride-share app.
Around the time of Mr. Egle’s alleged encounter with Ms. Colbert, Eric Maul, 32, who works in technology sales and lives in Los Angeles, said he had had a lot to drink in the French Quarter and called an Uber. A black Mustang pulled up, with Ms. Colbert driving, he said. About 10 minutes later, he said, she told him that her Uber app was not working and asked for his phone, which he unlocked and gave to her. She gave him a dead phone back, which he said led to an argument and prompted him to end the ride.
“Everything was already gone by the time I woke up,” said Mr. Maul, who learned that about $10,000 was missing from his accounts and that several loan applications had been filled out in his name.
He kept calling his phone, and about 24 hours later, someone picked up: It was Mr. Egle.
“Did she just rob you blind?” he asked Mr. Maul.
In conversations with the men and in their group chat, where they had commiserated and compared notes for many months, there was hope that others would not be victimized.
“Somebody shouldn’t have to die,” Mr. Egle said.
