Lauren Pazienza, who pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and assault in the death of Barbara Maier Gustern, had been celebrating her upcoming wedding before the bizarre attack.
A 26-year-old woman accused of fatally shoving a beloved Broadway singing coach pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and assault charges on Tuesday even as prosecutors described a pre-wedding celebration that devolved into a bizarre and deadly fit. The woman, Lauren Pazienza, was celebrating with her fiancé on the night of March 10, exactly 100 days before their planned June wedding, shortly before she shoved the coach, Barbara Maier Gustern,87, in an act that would ultimately kill her. Prosecutors said Ms. Pazienza had several glasses of wine and, after visiting a number of art galleries, took a meal purchased from a food cart into Manhattan’s Chelsea Park, a block from where the assault would soon take place. When a Parks Department employee told Ms. Pazienza that she would have to stop eating, she grew irate and shouted and cursed at him. She then turned and, for reasons unexplained, “threw her food on to her fiancé and stormed out of the park,” said one of the prosecutors, Justin McNabney. The fiancé, Naveen Pereira, told prosecutors that he headed toward the subway, planning to return to their shared apartment in Astoria. Ms. Pazienza, meanwhile, headed down 28th Street and spotted Ms. Gustern. Ms. Pazienza, who is 5-foot-7, ran across the street, called the 4-foot-11 Ms. Gustern a “bitch” and pushed her, prosecutors said, causing her to hit her head either on the cement or a metal fence nearby. Ms. Gustern, bleeding profusely from the head, ran into a friend shortly afterward and told her that she had never been hit harder in her life.
