The phone’s screen saver was the first sign that something was wrong.
When Jason Egle plugged the device in and fell asleep at his parents’ New Orleans-area home in the predawn hours of Oct. 16, 2021, it was dead. He hadn’t realized it was someone else’s.
But once he awoke, Egle recalled in an interview, he panicked and quickly came to believe his phone had been intentionally swapped the night before, when he said he may have been drugged and conned by a woman who claimed to be his Uber driver.
As Egle frantically tried to gain access to his accounts, he said, $15,000 vanished from his cryptocurrency account.
Egle, 50, now believes that driver was Danette Colbert, 48, the woman charged with fraud and other crimes this month after a Telemundo reporter covering the Super Bowl was found dead in his hotel in Kenner, west of New Orleans.
Colbert was previously charged in at least five other cases in two states involving allegations similar to Egle’s, and in the week since authorities announced Colbert’s arrest, police in Kenner say they have fielded a dozen complaints from people who believe they or a loved one may have been a victim of Colbert’s.
One of those possible victims, John Jenkins, 55, was found unresponsive in a New Orleans hotel in December. While Colbert hadn’t previously been identified as a suspect, Kenner Deputy Police Chief Mark McCormick told NBC News that authorities now suspect she had a part in Jenkins’ death.
Egle was another possible victim who reached out to the Kenner department after Colbert’s arrest to inform them that he believes she robbed and drugged him. He initially reported his claims to the New Orleans Police Department in 2021, shortly after he was allegedly robbed, according to a copy of a police report shared with NBC News, but he said nothing appears to have been done with the case.
A second man, Eric Maul, told NBC News he also believes he was targeted by Colbert while she allegedly posed as an Uber driver in the French Quarter. He did not know who was responsible when he filed a report with New Orleans police one day after his phone was taken in 2021 and thousands of dollars were stolen from accounts linked to the device, he said in an interview, but didn’t hear anything more from police.
The lack of response, Maul said, made him believe “they didn’t do anything.”
In an email, a New Orleans police spokesperson said the agency investigates each and every case filed with it. Investigators are examining “any and all” cases that may be connected to Colbert, including some in which she’s already been ruled out as a possible suspect, said the spokesperson, Karen Boudrie.
Boudrie said no suspects have been identified in connection with Maul’s allegations and an investigation is ongoing. Boudrie did not respond to a request for comment about the investigation in Egle’s case.
An Uber spokesperson said it did not appear that Colbert was a driver for the platform.
Current and former lawyers for Colbert either declined to comment or have not responded to requests for comment.
A trail of allegations and charges
Authorities have said that a cause of death for Adan Manzano, 27, the Telemundo reporter, has not yet been determined and that they are awaiting toxicology reports. Hotel security video showed Colbert entering a hotel room with Manzano at 4:35 a.m. on Feb. 5, Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley said earlier this month. The video showed her leaving, then returning, then leaving again at around 6 a.m., he said.
Manzano’s body was found that afternoon, the chief said. Colbert is alleged to have used the reporter’s credit card at a store in the New Orleans area, and a search of Colbert’s home in Slidell recovered what authorities believe is Manzano’s cellphone.
Colbert was arrested Feb. 7 and remains jailed without bond.
Her arrest in the Manzano case comes after allegations of similar crimes in Louisiana and Nevada stretching back years.
Earlier this winter, after Jenkins was found unresponsive on Dec. 15, the coroner’s office attributed his cause of death to combined cocaine and ethanol toxicity and ruled it accidental. McCormick did not provide details about what role police believe Colbert may have played in his death.
The deputy chief said Jenkins was missing property when he was found. A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police, which is assisting in the investigation, said the agency was not able to discuss any of the details involved in the investigation.
In 2022, prosecutors in Clark County, Nevada, accused Colbert of grand larceny and administering a drug to aid in the commission of a felony in two separate cases. According to Daniel Lippmann, the attorney who represented her, the charges were dismissed after the victims said they did not want to testify in court, The Associated Press reported.
In some cases, Colbert was convicted or pleaded guilty to similar charges.
In New Orleans in 2021, David Butler accused Colbert of drugging him, stealing his phone and emptying his cryptocurrency account of his life savings — roughly $80,000, he said. Colbert denied the allegations. After a trial last year, she was convicted of computer fraud, theft and illegal transmission of monetary funds and sentenced to five years’ probation, court records show.
In a 2016 case in nearby Jefferson Parish, a man said his Rolex, cellphone and two credit cards disappeared after he got drunk with two women in the French Quarter, according to a probable cause affidavit. Colbert pleaded guilty to fraud and illegal possession of stolen items in connection with the crimes, court records show, and was sentenced to three years in prison.
She was released on good time parole supervision in November 2017, a department of corrections spokesperson said, and charged with fraud again the following year after authorities in Jefferson Parish accused her of unlawfully accessing a man’s phone and stealing money, court records show. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation.
The victims in those cases could not be reached for comment, and it isn’t clear if the men accused her of drugging them.
Driver demands to see phone
In October 2021, Egle, a traveling nurse who was raised in New Orleans, was visiting home and had taken his nephew for a night out on Bourbon Street when he said he encountered Colbert.
They were at a bar when Egle suddenly felt so disoriented he was having trouble seeing straight and walking, he wrote in an email to his brother 10 days later that detailed the ordeal. Egle shared the note with NBC News.
It was shortly after midnight when they requested a car. A black Mustang pulled up with a passenger in the back and a driver who said she was from Uber, Egle wrote. They began driving, he told his brother in the email, but there was a discrepancy with their destination and the driver asked to see the app on his phone.
Egle said he handed her the device — a black iPhone 12 with a clear case — but the screen closed and locked, so she gave it back to him.
“This happened a couple of times before she’s like, ‘Just give me the code,’” he recalled. “So I gave her the code.”
Shortly after, Egle wrote, the driver told them they’d gotten in the wrong Uber. She returned the phone and told him it was out of power, he wrote.
“Sure enough it was dead,” he said in the email. “It appeared in every way to be my phone, same model, color, and was even in my case.”
When the driver dropped off Egle and his nephew, CJ Egle, they weren’t sure what to make of the brief, strange encounter.
“We thought they tried to rob us and failed,” the nephew said in an interview this week. “We didn’t realize we were wrong until the next morning.”
Watching $15,000 vanish
After Egle realized the phone wasn’t his, he got on a laptop and began trying to access his accounts. He had a password vault on his phone and it appeared whoever had his device had gotten into it, he wrote in his email to his brother, because all his passwords had been changed.
“I go into damage control mode immediately, and she’s locked me out of everything,” he said. “She’s already got a credit card in my name, she’s already got a loan in my name. And the worst part is she got in my cryptocurrency account, and I’m watching in real time as I’m getting emails as she’s emptying out my crypto account.”
Egle was able to mark the loan and credit card as fraudulent, he said, but $15,000 vanished from his Coinbase account.
Roughly two hours after Egle woke up, he got a call on the phone that wasn’t his.
“The guy’s like, ‘Dude, you got my phone,’” Egle recalls the man saying.
The man on the other end of the line was Eric Maul, who said he was also targeted in an alleged Uber scam. Maul recalled Egle telling him that he’d woken up with Maul’s phone in his own clear case.
“He’s like, ‘Did you get into an Uber that wasn’t an Uber?’” Maul said Egle asked. “I said, ‘How did you know that?’”
Maul, who’d been visiting New Orleans from Los Angeles, said that two nights before Egle’s encounter, he’d gotten into a car with a woman who claimed to be an Uber driver. She’d done the same thing with him as she’d done with Egle; when she told him the app was glitching out, Maul recalled, he handed her his unlocked phone.
When the driver tried to give him back a phone that wasn’t his, an argument followed, he said.
“She pulled several phones from her cleavage and said, ‘I don’t know which one is yours,” he said. “At this point, I’m like, this is bad. I don’t know if she’s prone to violence. So at the next stoplight, I get out and book it.”
Maul said he soon discovered that someone had drained thousands of dollars from his Robin Hood account, opened a line of credit in his name and downloaded his W2 from last tax season.
He’d also been pickpocketed. Maul said he wasn’t sure when this happened — perhaps at the bar he’d gone to before he got in the Uber — but when he looked in his wallet, it was empty.
“I had my physical wallet, but they took everything in it,” he said. “Then they put it back.”
A startling message
A week after Egle’s phone was stolen, another person reached out via Facebook with a startling message: Their phone had been stolen in New Orleans, and now, images of Egle’s financial documents were appearing on the cloud service the man used. Included in the message were images of Egle’s tax returns and a request to confirm a residential address for a bank account, according to screenshots Egle shared with NBC News.
“They stole $16K from me yours get stolen too?” the man said in another message.
Egle said that man told him he had blacked out after hanging out with two women at the bar where Egle had been with his nephew. When he awoke in a hotel room, Egle recalled the man saying, his phone was gone and thousands of dollars had been transferred out of his Coinbase account. (The man did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.)
Egle said the man told him that he had been drugged and that he and Egle may have been similarly targeted. Egle drinks regularly, he said, but never to intoxication — and he’d suddenly become “extremely intoxicated” that night.
In the email to his brother, Egle wondered if that might explain why he’d done something as unwise as sharing the passcode for his phone with the driver.
“Never in a million years would I do such a thing and the whole event is hazy,” he wrote.
‘No one would help’
The three men remained in touch, Egle said. He and Maul filed reports with the New Orleans Police Department, Egle said, and he tried to get security camera video from the bars where they believed they may have been drugged.
But those efforts went nowhere, Egle said. And despite repeatedly contacting the police department, Egle said he never heard back. The same was true for Maul.
“No one would help,” he said. “That’s the darkest it got for me.”
In 2022, months after his Uber ride, Egle said he got in touch with David Butler, whose encounter with Colbert came weeks after Egle’s and Maul’s. Butler had reached out after one of the men described being drugged and robbed on Reddit.
Butler provided them with Colbert’s name and a link to her social media. He asked if she looked familiar, Egle recalled.
“Immediately, we were like, that’s absolutely her,” he said. “No doubt.”
“100%,” added Maul. “I recognized her.”
The post Woman linked to reporter Adan Manzano’s death accused of drugging other men, draining their accounts appeared first on NBC News.
