Actress shot dead outside New York bar

Friday, January 28, 2005 Posted: 12:24 PM EST (1724 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- An aspiring actress and playwright whose work explored life's darker sides was shot and killed as she confronted an armed robber during an early-morning street holdup.

The robber ran off with his accomplices, police said. No arrests have been made.

Nicole duFresne, 28, had just left a bar in a trendy section of the Lower East Side with her fiance and another couple early Thursday when they were approached by four or five men.

Witnesses told investigators that one of the men grabbed for the other woman's purse and duFresne intervened, asking, "What are you going to do, shoot us?" A man then fired one shot at her, police said.

"One of them said, 'Give me your money.' I didn't see he had a gun. I didn't understand what was happening," said Jeffrey Sparks, duFresne's 28-year-old fiance.

Sparks, an online music producer, said he pushed the mugger aside and was pistol-whipped on the face.

DuFresne died from a gunshot wound to her chest.

The couple, both from Minneapolis, moved to Brooklyn from Seattle two years ago and were to be married in October.

A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, duFresne was a founding member of the Present Tense Theater Project and acted with the LAByrinth Theater Co., according to her online resume. She wrote a play called "Burning Cage" with Mary Jane Gibson, who was with her and her fiance at the time of the shooting.

"Burning Cage" is about two women in a Boston asylum who are targeted for clandestine brainwashing experiments with LSD and shock treatments. The play toured in 2002 at fringe theater festivals in Canada and the United States.

DuFresne's other play, "Matter," is about an amnesiac whose apartment is taken over by a violent and seductive intruder. It was performed in Brooklyn in 2003.