A former longtime exotic dancer found dead dumped in a trash can at a remote Brooklyn beach was a devoted mother of five who was beloved in the city’s nightclub community, her devastated friends tell the Daily News.
Tanaya Campbell Ortiz, 38, was found stuffed inside the trash can in a parking lot at Plumb Beach just off the Belt Parkway in Sheepshead Bay about 3 p.m. Sept. 16, cops say. A cause of death has not yet been determined and it’s not yet clear if she was the victim of foul play.
“I’m devastated,” said close friend Cassy Gorham, who met the victim when they worked in a strip club together in 2007. “She’s a very sweet girl, one of the sweetest, most funniest people I’ve ever met. Always laughing, always happy, always smiling.”
“She genuinely just did not deserve what happened to her, to be thrown out like trash like that,” Gorham added. “She deserved so much better. She’s always been a great mother and her kids didn’t deserve that either, to lose her.”
After developing friendships and contacts for years working in local strip clubs under the stage name “Honey,” Campbell Ortiz this year launched her own events company called Red Honey Productions. The company threw bashes including birthday parties and offered bar service and home-cooked catering like pumpkin rice, macaroni pie, and oxtail.
In between posts promoting her events, Campbell Ortiz frequently posted about her children, congratulating one daughter for graduating high school and wishing one son happy birthday and cheering on his basketball team.
The victim’s oldest daughter, Julissa Hernandez, wrote that her mother’s death has torn the family apart on a GoFundMe to raise money for Campbell Ortiz’s funeral costs.
“Everyone is devastated. [My mother] had not been herself recently, so seeing all of this unfold is hard to even understand, especially because we had just recently seen or spoken with her. The shock of losing her this way has left our family heartbroken and struggling to face what comes next,” she wrote.
“Anyone who knew my mother knew that she was full of love and life, and did whatever she could to help everyone she loved.”
The city Medical Examiner is conducting an autopsy to determine how Campbell Ortiz died. She lived in St. Albans, according to cops.
Her death has sent shockwaves through the club world.
“When you’re working in the nightlife, you’re in the club with people every day, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, no breaks,” Gorham said. “You spend a considerable amount of time with these people, so they become your family outside your family.”
News of Campbell Ortiz’s death is “circulating pretty fast amongst us girls,” said Gorham, who moved to North Carolina in 2020. “A lot of us don’t work anymore but we all stay in contact.”
“When somebody told me, I couldn’t even wrap my head around it,” she added. “I was like, ‘Honey, no. Nobody would do anything to Honey. Honey’s too sweet.’”
Gorham recalled Honey once leaping off the stage to defend her.
“A customer punched me in my face because I wouldn’t give my phone number,” Gorham said. “I just remembered Tanaya jumping off the stage and literally holding my mouth and my face together until the ambulance got there.”
“I was bleeding all over her but she didn’t care,” Gorham added. “She had my blood all over her and she just stayed with me and helped me. That’s just that person that she is.”
Gorham last spoke to the victim in April.
“She was like, ‘You’re beautiful and I’m just happy you’re still here. You survived everything you’ve been through and I love you to death.’ That’s what she told me,” Gotham recalled. “I was like, ‘I love you too.’ And she was like, ‘I’m very blessed to have you as my very close friend,’ and that was the last thing she said to me.”
“She was always making me laugh, always saying something funny, always smiling,” she added. “I don’t know if she ever had a bad day — and if she did, she held it together very well. She was just a light, a bright light … I just wanted so much better for her. I can’t believe this. It’s unbelievable to me.”
Other people who knew Campbell Ortiz from her nightclub work were equally shocked by her death.
“Honey was not one of those girls that had trouble,” said Chris, 39, who worked security at Crazy Horse, formerly Key Club Cabaret, in the Bronx and drove Campbell Ortiz home several times. “She wasn’t one of the wild ones. Honey was a sweet young lady. Like she was there to do her thing, get her money, and that’s it.”
“It’s just really sad to hear this and I don’t know how to deal with this,” said Salma, who met Campbell Ortiz at the club Perfections in 2008, where Salma worked as a makeup artist for the dancers. “She would just go home and just enjoy her kids. She was all about her kids.”
“I danced with her in the past in Club Infinity, Crazy Horse, Lust, Heavens—many clubs from Brooklyn to Queens to the Bronx,” said a friend and fellow former exotic dancer who asked to be referred to by her stage name, Paradice.
“She held herself with a poise and respect. She would talk about her kids all the time, and we would discuss our kids because I have a child as well and they were similar age.”