Lara Prychodko, a wealthy Manhattan woman who died after plunging down her building’s trash chute in 2018 was considered a bizarre accident, but her dad has a different theory.
Claiming in a wild new lawsuit that his daughter’s estranged husband hired a hitman to have her killed.
The Manhattan Supreme Court wrongful death suit — filed Tuesday by Prychodko’s father, Nicholas Prychodko, and financial advisor Lance Meyerowich on behalf of her estate — offers no proof of the claim.
But it alleges that Prychodko’s estranged husband David Schlachet paid someone to off his 48-year-old wife because he stood to lose as much as half of an approximately $6 million fortune upon the couple’s finalization of their contentious divorce.
No criminal charges have been filed against Schlachet in connection to the case.
Prychodko was found dead July 10 in the basement garbage room of her luxury Union Square building, less than a month after she celebrated her birthday in Paris with family and friends.
Cops at the time said she was last seen alive on surveillance video, in which she appeared to be drunk and stumbling about.
A maintenance worker discovered her body “crushed from multiple angles” in the compactor, police have said.
The city Medical Examiner ruled Prychodko’s death an accident in December that year.
But her family maintained it was no accident, and hired former New York City chief medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden, who said he found that Prychodko may have been strangled to death.
Now their new suit alleges she was strangled by hit man — identified only as “John Doe,” and also named as a defendant in the court papers — at the behest of Schlachet.
The lawsuit alleges the hubby and John Doe met in Manhattan several times in June 2018.
“Upon information and belief, during these meetings, Schlachet offered to pay John Doe to murder Lara Prychodko,” the suit claims, adding that John Doe accepted “and agreed to murder” her.
The suit charges that Schlachet was able to track Prychodko through software he installed on her laptop, and in early July 2018, “John Doe” visited the Zeckendorf Towers and another nearby building where Prychodko kept an apartment.
The court documents posits that when Prychodko took the elevator up to the 27th floor on July 10, 2018, “John Doe strangled her to death and then disposed of her body down the building’s trash chute.”
Days later, the suit alleges that Schlachet met with “John Doe” in Manhattan and “made a final payment to John Doe for the murder of Lara Prychodko.”
Schlachet then attempted to “cover up” the alleged slaying by planting “stories in various news outlets to shift the focus away from himself as a suspect,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit accuses Schlachet of being “financially motivated” to kill the mom of one, who he was going through an “acrimonious divorce” with at the time. Read more from NY Post
