Category: Breaking News

Victims of fentanyl poisonings push for broader jurisdiction of fentanyl laws

A group of activists rallied outside the State Capitol Sunday afternoon to push for tougher punishments for people who illegally distribute fentanyl.

The group is pushing for two bills to pass, Senate Bill 189 and House Bill 250.

If the bills pass, it would broaden who gets criminally prosecuted for distributing fentanyl. As it stands, North Carolina is one of the few states that has a death-by-distribution law.

That law allows district attorneys to prosecute people who sell drugs that lead to an overdose death.

The bills would allow district attorneys to prosecute people for not just selling drugs, but for general distribution, even if there is no money involved.

“They would see the person who killed their son, or daughter, or wife or cousin in the courtroom,” Executive Director of the Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina Barb Walsh said. “And there’s no words for that.”

Walsh and her group have been connecting family members of fentanyl overdose victims with one another to form a support group.

Read the full article and watch the video on the WRAL website.

Download Article PDF

NC Newsline interview with Barb Walsh

In the list of horrors that a parent might ever experience, losing one’s child because she unknowingly grabbed and drank a bottle of water laced with fentanyl has to be among the worst imaginable. And tragically, that’s what happened to a North Carolina woman named Barb Walsh in 2021 when her daughter Sophia died almost instantly from fentanyl poisoning.

Read the full story and listen to the interview on the NC Newsline website.

Download Article PDF

Families of loved ones who died from fentanyl poisoning push for justice

CONCORD, N.C. — Families in Cabarrus County are pushing for justice for loved ones who have died from fentanyl.

Beth Abernathy said her son, Marshall Abbott, died due to fentanyl poisoning last year one day before his 30th birthday.

She attended a pretrial hearing Tuesday for Aaron Furr at the Cabarrus County Courthouse. Furr was charged in connection with the death.

Furr is one of five people in Cabarrus County who have been charged with felony death by distribution since the law went into effect in 2019.

Read the full article and watch the video on the WSOCTV9 website.

Download Article PDF

NC autopsy backlog frustrates families, leaves cases open

NORTH CAROLINA — Some North Carolina families are waiting months, even a year, to find out how their loved one died due to the state’s autopsy backlog.

Lawmakers are trying to address this in several different ways, but it is all tied up in the looming budget right now.

Barbara Walsh is the founder of Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina, an organization for families of fentanyl victims. She said fixing the autopsy backlog is critical to getting families closure and justice.

For months, Walsh had no idea what killed her 24-year-old daughter Sofia who had just moved to Charlotte for a new job.

“She died because she drank a water bottle that had diluted fentanyl in it,” Walsh said.

Now, families she’s helping through her organization are waiting even longer, sometimes over a year, for toxicology results as the medical examiner’s office faces a massive backlog in autopsies.

Walsh is vocal about the state budget as some lawmakers have promised to help clear the autopsy backlog.

One of the new proposals would pay pathologists more to try and fill positions at the short-staffed medical examiner’s office, which has seen a 30% increase in cases. Cases involving suspected overdose deaths are up by 58%.

Read the full story and watch the video on the WSOCTV9 website.

Download Article PDF

Chinese fentanyl cartel ordered to pay Akron family $18M by judge

Ruling is first-of-it’s kind to go after overseas fentanyl producers

CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) -On Wednesday, it was announced a Summit County judge ruled in favor of the Rauh family, who’s son died of a fentanyl overdose in 2015, and ordered a Chinese cartel to pay $18 million.

Thomas “Tommy” Rauh became addicted to prescription opioids after a rollerblading accident, which then led to him using heroin.

According to his father James Rauh, Tommy tried to overcome the addiction but took a fatal dose in 2015, laced with fentanyl.

The fentanyl that killed Tommy was traced to, and produced by, the Zheng drug trafficking cartel in China.

“Our son Tommy was stolen from us,” Rauh said. “He never stood a chance against the incredibly potent poison provided by the Zhengs. All for what? The reckless and malicious greed of the Zheng cartel. To save American lives, we must stop the foreign manufacturers and traffickers of illegal fentanyl and hold them accountable.”

Read the full article and watch the video on the Channel 19 website.

Download Article PDF

‘They are dealing death’: WRAL Investigates goes undercover to get firsthand look at fentanyl crisis in NC

It’s a killer the size of grain of sand or the tip of a pen. Illegal fentanyl is running rampant through North Carolina, and the consequences are terrifying.

Fentanyl deaths are on the rise in North Carolina. Last year, 4,000 people lost their lives to drug overdoses in our state. The majority — 77% — died due to fentanyl poisoning.

The Nash County Sheriff’s Office recently confiscated enough fentanyl to kill every person in the county. WRAL Investigates spent several days with undercover agents and confidential informants on the streets of Nash County as law enforcement battles the war on this poison.

Early one summer morning, the Nash County Sheriff’s Special Response Team conducted a search at a mobile home. A family, including kids in their pajamas, filed out of the home. One person came out in handcuffs.

“Children put things in their mouth. That makes it more alarming,” said one member of the response team.

With their work done at the mobile home, the next raid was on, this time in Rocky Mount. A flash bang disrupts the silence at a home on Pine Street.The SRT quickly enters the home yelling, “Come to the center of the room” and “Hands Up!”

“This is an older neighborhood with a lot of good families in it. This house — drugs were bought out of it yesterday,” WRAL Investigates was told.

A search revealed fentanyl and heroin, as well as a stolen gun. The SRT also found high-powered ammunition.

“As you can see with tips of these they are capable of going through wood-framed houses and bullet-proof vests,” investigators told WRAL Investigates.

Targeting guns, drugs and gangs is the mission of the Nash County Sheriff’s Office under the direction of Sheriff Keith Stone.

Read the full article on the WRAL website.

Download Article PDF

Families grieving fentanyl deaths to rally in support of new laws

sdfasdf

The Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina will rally at the N.C. State Capitol Building later this month, pushing for stronger penalties for illegal distribution of the synthetic opioid and more funding for early intervention, Naloxone and processing toxicology reports. They are also asking state lawmakers for opioid overdoses to be investigated as homicides.

As NC Newsline has reported, North Carolina has been hard hit by fentanyl, an epidemic within the larger opioid epidemic. Some 13,671 North Carolinians have been killed by fentanyl in the last nine years, according to data from the N.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner — an average of eight people per day.

Even those numbers likely do not take in the full scope of the problem, medical experts say.

In North Carolina, death certificates don’t have a specific code for fentanyl’s involvement in a drug overdose. There is a code – T40.4 — for “other synthetic narcotic overdose.” The Epidemiology, Surveillance and Informatics unit of the N.C. Division of Public Health’s Injury and Violence Prevention Branch notes that most of these cases are “due to illicitly manufactured fentanyl and fentanyl analogues,” but can also include prescription fentanyl and other, less potent synthetic narcotics like Tramadol.

An analysis of statistics from the state medical examiner’s office found overdose deaths with the T40.4 code rose from 442 in 2016 (the first year for which the office had such statistics) to 3,163 in 2021 — an increase of 616%.

As of April, according to OCME data, there were 1,116 fentanyl-positive overdose deaths in the state so far this year.

Read the full article on NCNewsline.com.

Download Article PDF
Translate »