DALLAS — The “one pill can kill” fentanyl epidemic has hit home. Three young Carrollton-Farmers Branch students are dead and six others have been hospitalized in a string of overdoses, most of them since December.
Federal investigators say each of these tragedies traces back to a single Carrollton house, located just blocks from R.L. Turner High School, where juvenile dealers as young as 14 picked up the drugs and sold them to classmates.
The grim narrative was laid out in a criminal complaint filed against Luis Eduardo Navarrete and Magaly Mejia Cano as the pair made their initial appearance Monday afternoon in federal court in Dallas on charges of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl.
The Dallas Morning News broke the story just as the document was unsealed in federal court.
The list of kids winding up dead or revived in the emergency room as a result of drug overdoses has grown steadily, week after week, since mid December, according to the complaint — a pattern of tragedy playing out in full view in this inner-ring suburb.
The most recent death linked to distribution of fentanyl-laced pills by Navarrete and Mejia Cano occurred Feb. 1 and at least one 13-year-old student is among the nine overdose victims, according to the federal complaint.
The fatalities and overdoses involve teens enrolled in R.L. Turner, DeWitt Perry Middle School and Dan F. Long Middle School. Neither the victims, one of whom overdosed twice, nor student dealers — all of them minors — are named in the complaint.
U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Leigha Simonton described the defendants’ alleged actions as “simply despicable.”
“To deal fentanyl is to knowingly imperil lives. To deal fentanyl to minors — naive middle and high school students — is to shatter futures,” she said in a written statement to The Dallas Morning News.
The alleged drug house is a bedraggled residence, its roof and wood accents peeling away from the brown brick. The address on the front of the house is easy to spot, 1823 Highland Drive, just a block south of East Belt Line Road and a few houses west of Josey Lane.
Ongoing surveillance at the residence, according to the criminal complaint, revealed Navarrete, 21, and Mejia Cano, 29, distributing drugs to multiple individuals, many of them Turner students. The complaint also states that eight of these juveniles — ages 14 to 16 — in turn distributed them to other students.
Asked whether the alleged juvenile dealers were still on campus or whether any juveniles had been apprehended, Carrollton Police Department spokeswoman Isamar Leguizamo said, “This remains an active investigation.” She wouldn’t comment on possible arrests.
After the indictment was unsealed Monday, The Dallas Morning News reached out to Carrollton-Farmers Branch interim superintendent Brian Moersch and chief communications officer Dawn Parnell regarding what type of fentanyl-specific education had been conducted with students since December.
Parnell said she would be back in touch later Monday.
The federal complaint includes the story of one 14-year-old R.L. Turner student who was brought back from the edge of death twice after she overdosed on an “M30.”
M30 is among the most common street names, along with “percs” and “yerks,” for the blue pressed-powder fentanyl pills, which users generally crush and snort or smoke. The complaint against Navarrete and Mejia Cano described the drugs they distributed as “fake Percocet and OxyContin tablets laced with fentanyl.
The 14-year-old girl, as described in the complaint, overdosed at her home on Christmas Eve and survived after first responders rushed her to an unspecified hospital. The same series of events happened again Jan. 16; this time she suffered temporary paralysis.
According to the complaint, the girl and her mother told investigators two different classmates sold her the M30s. She also said she had purchased multiple M30 tablets directly from Navarrete at the Highland Drive house.
Federal drug agents and Carrollton police began working around the clock in January to look into the suspicious series of juvenile medical emergencies, the first in September.
The complaint says surveillance at the Highland Drive house documented Navarrete making a “hand to hand” transaction with a 16-year-old R.L. Turner student, identified as one of the juvenile dealers.
The boy “appeared to crush up a pill and snort it on the front porch area of the residence” before appearing “to manipulate small pieces of paper and possibly package drugs,” the complaint says.
A school resource officer was notified as the student began walking toward the high school campus, and he detained the young man after he was observed “making a ‘snorting sound’” in a bathroom stall.
The 16-year-old seemed to be intoxicated and had a razor blade and “snort straw” with residue, according to the federal document.
The complaint says the 16-year-old admitted the paraphernalia was used to ingest a “perc pill.”
Navarrete frequently communicated with student dealers, including this 16-year-old dealer, through Instagram, the complaint says.
According to Dallas County criminal court records, Navarrete pleaded guilty in December to a April 2020 domestic violence assault in Carrollton, a Class A misdemeanor.
A records search showed no criminal history on Mejia Cano.
A law enforcement official close to the federal case said, at the same time Navarrete was distributing fentanyl tablets to minors, he was wearing an electronic monitoring device. When he and Mejia Cano were arrested at the Highland Drive house Friday, the electronic device was still in place.
During Monday’s court appearance, Navarrete, in a blue heathered hoodie, often dropped his head and looked down at the table. Mejia Cano, in a short-sleeve green T-shirt and camo-colored pants, stood hunched over with arms crossed in front of her.
This case is only in its opening chapter. As it progresses — and as state and local agencies decide how to handle the juvenile dealers — more details will emerge, including what additional drug activity occurred on school property.
It’s incredibly rare for juveniles, especially those as young as what’s alleged in this case, to face federal prosecution.
Whether the Carrollton-Farmers Branch teens knew exactly what the M30s contained is not known.
Fentanyl, a highly potent and addictive synthetic opiate, is often mixed with acetaminophen and other substances then pressed into pills.
Sometimes dealers circulate them under the guise of prescription drugs. such as Percocet or Oxycontin, that individuals don’t know contain fentanyl. In other cases, users specifically seek out fentanyl.
The going street rate for users is $10 per M30, according to the complaint.
While law enforcement generally uses the term “overdose,” many people, especially those who have lost loved ones to fentanyl, say “poisoning” is a more appropriate term because a tiny amount can be lethal.
Chopped-up M30 was found alongside at least one Carrollton victim, according to the law enforcement official. He also said medical personnel saved the lives of several of the victims with Narcan, a nasal spray that contains the medication naloxone and can reverse an opioid overdose.
Carrollton-Farmers Branch is not the first school district whose student population is being victimized by fentanyl, which DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in August is “the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered.”
Southwest of Austin, fentanyl-laced pills have killed five students in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District since last summer, according to authorities. The district has since begun an intensive fentanyl-education campaign.
Regarding the North Texas case, U.S. Attorney Simonton said, “We can never replace the three teenagers whose lives were lost, nor can we heal the psychological scars of those who survived their overdoses. But we can take action to ensure these individuals are never allowed to hand a pill to a child again.”
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(Dallas Morning News staff writer Maggie Prosser contributed to this report.)
