A Washington State man allegedly raped an 18-year-old as she lay dying from a drug overdose and sent partially-nude photos of her to a group text.
The 19-year-old man boasted about having sex with Mariner High School student Alyssa Mae Nocedato to his co-workers at Dairy Queen, where he then worked a double shift before returning home to stuff her body into a crate with plans to bury it, police allege in documents obtained by PEOPLE.
After she died, the man used the Nocedato’s fingerprint to access her locked cell phone and posted a message on her personal SnapChat account to suggest she had run away, “which he knew the female had history of,” according to a probable cause affidavit in the case.
“She died having sex with me,” Brian Roberto Varela, of Lynnwood, told to a co-worker at a local Dairy Queen, where he worked Sunday after he says he awoke at his home alongside the victim’s body following a party the previous night, the document states.
Varela, who has not yet entered a plea, was arrested Tuesday and is being held in Snohomish County jail after his arrest for rape, manslaughter and homicide by controlled substance, according to jail records. Each of the three charges carries a $500,000 bond.
Jail records do not indicate if an attorney has been appointed to represent him or speak on his behalf.
After Varela shared parts of his story with co-workers, one of them alerted a girlfriend, who went online and matched the alleged victim with a Facebook post from a mother seeking help to locate her missing daughter.
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The co-worker and the co-worker’s girlfriend then reported the death to police in Everett, Washington, who went to Varela’s home and found the victim’s body in a plastic crate in Varela’s bedroom.
At the party, Varela said Nocedato, The Daily Herald reports, snorted a line of crushed Percocet pills before she ingested a “dab” of liquid THC – liquid marijuana – that Varela provided and shared with her at a Feb. 3 party, police say.
He says she passed out on his bed within 30 to 60 seconds.
“LOL I think she OD’d, still breathing, I’m smashing her to pass the time,” Varela then allegedly wrote in a group text to three of his co-workers. He also shared two photos of the victim, nude except for a pair of white Calvin Klein undergarment briefs, “on her back with swollen purple/blue lips clearly unconscious,” the probable cause affidavit states.
One of Varela’s co-workers told police the term “meant that Brian Varela was having sex with the female.”
Varela’s mother told police that she had recently “kicked out” her son because of his drug use and “gangster lifestyle,” according to the affidavit. Varela had then moved in with a neighbor who hosted the Feb. 3 party, and who, after Varela told him the next day that Noceda had overdosed, advised him to call 911, police say.
Instead, Varela went to work.
As Varela allegedly talked further with a co-worker about the incident, he said that because he’d had intercourse with the victim, it could appear he had “raped” the victim. He told the co-worker, “I don’t know if she was alive or dead” during the sex, the affidavit states.
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He told his friend that he thought the victim still was breathing and he wanted to take her to the emergency room, but that he was too tired and chose instead to go to sleep, the document states.
According to police, Varela said he created the misleading SnapChat post on the victim’s phone because he, too, had gone online and seen the Facebook post from the victim’s mother announcing that she was missing. Afterward, he tossed the victim’s phone into a construction zone behind the Dairy Queen, according to the affidavit.
Varela allegedly told his co-worker that he had to break the victim’s legs and “bleed her out” in order to stuff the deceased into a crate prior to taking it to a “hole” that he had identified in Marysville and where he planned to dispose of the body.
Anna Clark, in the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office, tells PEOPLE that a court hearing for Varela is not yet scheduled.