I SURVIVED DATING ‘KILLER’
Ex-gal pal’s chilling escape from fiend’s deadly grip
He seemed nice — a good listener — who was interested in her work with the disabled.
Zynea Barney, 26, met Danueal Drayton on the dating app “Plenty of Fish” in November 2017 and he wooed her with his big vocabulary and ability to fix cars.
“There weren’t any issues. Nothing awkward,” she said in an exclusive interview with the Daily News. “He was a cool guy.”
But in the end, he slashed her tires, threatened to cut her brake lines and tried to strangle her in a park in Inwood, L.I., not far from her home.
She was one of the lucky ones.
Confessed serial killer Drayton claims he murdered as many as seven people, including Queens nurse Samantha Stewart, who was found dead in her Springfield Gardens apartment on July 17.
Drayton pleaded not guilty Monday to charges he raped and attempted to kill a 28-yearold woman he held captive July 23 in a North Hollywood, Calif., apartment.
Barney’s close call came June 13, when Drayton told her he was moving west to California. They’d dated for six months, and Drayton wanted to see her one last time.
They met at a Chipotle for lunch. Drayton didn’t eat.
“He asked me, ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ ” She told him she wasn’t, and he seemed to accept that.
Then they drove around in her car for a while, until she told him she had errands to run.
“He was like, ‘Can I chill with you the whole day?’ I said ‘No.’ So, he said, ‘Take me to the park, I have to get a bag of clothes.’ ”
He said he’d left the bag in Inwood Park in Long Island, across Jamaica Bay from Kennedy Airport, to pick up later.
“I parked my car at the entrance of the park. I put my car in drive, my seatbelt was still on, doors were still locked,” she said. “Then I told him to go. He looked at me and said, ‘So we’re really not going to get back together? You don’t ever see a fuBarney ture. said it was time to put her foot down. It was time for her to break off with him for good.
“My tone was probably a little aggressive,” she said. “I was being firm.”
Drayton got out of the car, but then paused and started digging through his pockets, pretending that he lost his phone charger.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I gotta go. Can you close the door?” That’s when he jumped her. “He just hopped across, into my car, both knees on my knees, and started strangling me.
“Everything happened so fast.
“He was choking me, saying “F---king b---h, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you. No, no. I told you, it’s just me and you.’ ”
As Barney struggled for breath, her mind switched to survival mode. She unfastened her seatbelt and tried to open the car door.
“That’s when he grabbed the door and tried to close it, but he had one hand on my throat.”
She said she finally threw herself out of the vehicle.
Three factory workers passing by saw her and asked if everything was all right.
“No, he’s trying to kill me,” she told them.
The men pulled Drayton off her and called the police.
Drayton wasn’t arrested, for reasons t at rema n unc ear.
Police took Barney back to her apartment. She ran inside, packed her bags and left home with her 3-year-old son. She was afraid Drayton would come back looking for her. She was right to fear him. “The next day, he kept calling me. He kept popping up to my house, telling me he was going to kill my son,” she said.
He slashed her tires and threatened to cut her brake line, all the while messaging her online.
“I’m going to set your car on fire,” he wrote her. “You mad? You mad?”
Their first dates didn’t portend violence. “He seemed nice. He was a good listener,” Barney said. “I don’t know if he was pretending, but he would act like he was interested in what I do for a living.” And he was charming. “His vocabulary was very expansive, the way he carried conversations. He would draw you more into him.”
Police say Drayton met women on dating sites and apps like Tinder and Plenty of Fish. He lived in Connecticut and she lived in Long Island, so it was a month before they met.
“I needed a new motor for my 2003 Nissan Murano,” she said. “He said he knew somebody that could fix it, that I could pay a cheaper price. So I drove to Connecticut.”
They ended up hitting it off
yp g g. “It wasn’t intimate,” she said. “We were just laughing and talking the whole time.”
Despite the distance between them, they started dating. Everything seemed to go well until April.
“We had a fallout because he was using (Plenty of Fish) and he was talking to another woman from Brooklyn,” Barney said. “He left the phone in the car and it started ringing and this girl’s name Cherry came up. So I anwoman.” She wasn’t going to put up with that.
“That’s where I drew the line,” she said. “I told him we could be friends from here, but just to be honest with me. He was like, ‘Oh, it was nothing. It was just a girl from Brooklyn.’ ”
Barney wasn’t convinced. She broke it off, but promised they could stay friends.
But Drayton wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
“He was still trying to get me … In his mind, he was thinking we could still get back together. So he would do anything and everything. He would pop up at my house, buy me a suitcase full of sneakers, give me money to pay my bills.”
But Barney believed the relationship was over. She tried to let him down slowly.
“Each week, I would distance myself more and more,” she said. “That’s when I started to see the possessiveness and aggression. He would pop up at my house, knocking on my door. One day, I didn’t answer my phone and he sat outside my window and watched me and called my name.” He just wouldn’t go away. “He took my landlord’s ladder and tried to climb through my window,” Barney said. “He would act like he was doing stuff to my car so I would come outside and he could see me. But I didn’t budge.”
Police finally arrested Drayton for assaulting Barney on June 30, and charged him with strangulation and criminal trespass. He was ordered held on $2,000 bail.
But on July 5, Nassau County officials let him go.
No one told Barney he’d been freed.
“I was shocked,” she said. “He was released?”
Drayton had eluded authorities before. Weeks before the Samantha Stewart killing, he had skipped meetings with his Connecticut probation officer required as part of his sentence on harassment charges. Drayton served 4½ years in Connecticut prison on charges including second-degree strangulation, unlawful restraint and violating a restraining order.
“They should have never released him after everything he did,” Barney said of Nassau County authorities. “The man showed every sign of aggression. I was so hurt. He was around my family, he introduced me to all his friends in Connecticut.”
She said she never saw it coming.
“They said he was a standup guy.”
With Thomas Tracy, Rocco Parascandola, Nancy Dillon and Reuven Blau