The took mushrooms together and meditated together; how did it end in murder?...

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“It is going to sound insane because it is insane,” Akshaya Kubiak told the 911 dispatcher. It was 10 a.m. on July 16, 2020, and Kubiak was calling from his Las Vegas condo; near him lay the dead body of a woman. “We took mushrooms together, said our prayers together, put on Avatar together,” said Kubiak. At 6’1” and 205 pounds, Kubiak was muscular and handsome; he was best known as the star of Showtime’s reality show Gigolos, where he went by the name Ash Armand. “I don’t know if you’ve ever done mushrooms before,” he said to the dispatcher, “but I was no longer in this reality. I was in trans-different realities. And then I saw the person next to me.” The person next to him was Herleen Kaur Dulai, a 29-year-old Temple University graduate with shiny black hair, large brown eyes, and a sparkling smile. She was gorgeous — she modeled occasionally — but was known for being shy and reserved. That may have been what drew Kubiak to her. “He would go after the new [models] that seemed lost,” said Leslie*, a friend of Kubiak’s. Dulai fit the bill; fairly new to Las Vegas, she'd moved there in 2017 to pursue a post-baccalaureate degree after having obtained her bachelor’s in biological sciences. While Leslie acknowledged that “moving to Vegas sort of feels like playing Russian roulette a little,” it seemed, at least in the beginning, that Dulai was avoiding the Vegas trap. A family friend of Dulai’s named Amrita described it this way: In Vegas, “Herleen broke free.”


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“There was a struggle,” Kubiak told the 911 operator the next morning. “I temporarily lost my mind.” Kubiak told the dispatcher that Dulai had had a heart attack, and that she’d had a history of cancer. Clark County Fire Captain Darren Lutes received the call a little while later, sending him to Kubiak’s condo at 8463 Blackstone Ridge Court. Lutes and his three crew members raced up the stairs to the primary bedroom, and there was Kubiak, pressing down on Dulai’s chest, his phone by his side. “One and two and three and four,” intoned the 911 operator as they coached him through his CPR, according to court documents. But, what Lutes and his team saw when they arrived hardly looked like a heart attack. Lutes took note of Dulai’s “black and blue and swollen” face, blood surrounding her matted hair. Her ear was a giant bruise. Her body was covered in candle wax, as was the open suitcase that lay at her feet. Two candles stood near her body, their surfaces marked with bloody handprints. Near the suitcase was a black shirt and a ceramic statue, both spattered with blood. Lutes ordered Kubiak to “step out of the way,” so his team could “take over.”


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Dulai was never transported to the hospital. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Homicide detectives were sent to the house, and they found blood spattered inside the washing machine, and bloody clothes inside it. On the bathroom counter were bloodstains that had been watered down, as if in an attempt to wash them away, and a blood-soaked towel. “There was the appearance of clean-up is the best way to put it,” said a detective in the Grand Jury Indictment. A sheathed knife hung on the wall to the left of Kubiak’s bed. Detectives found a pocket knife, too. Dulai’s backpack was leaning against the couch. Mushrooms were in the refrigerator. When police inspected Kubiak for injuries, all they found was a small cut on the middle finger of his left hand and blood in his ear, which they assumed was from performing CPR on Dulai.

What happened?




https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/202...tm_source=digg