A drug dealer who sold a fatal dose of MDMA laced with fentanyl to a Dallas woman in December of 2024 has become the first person in Dallas County to be convicted of murder under Texas’s fentanyl statute.
The conviction comes after a long investigation by the Dallas Police Department (DPD), an investigation built largely on text messages and forensic toxicology work by a veteran narcotics detective.
Destin Scott, 29, pleaded guilty on June 10 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison after admitting he sold the drugs that killed 25-year-old Morgan Peterson, per the DPD. This case will officially be the first time prosecutors in Dallas County have secured a conviction under the 2023 law that allows dealers to be charged with murder when the drugs they sell cause a fatal overdose.
A Welfare Check Turns Into a Homicide Case
Dallas Fire-Rescue crews were called to a business just before noon on December 11, 2024, after witnesses spotted Peterson slumped over and unresponsive inside a parked car. Paramedics later pronounced her dead at the scene.
At first, there was little to suggest a crime had occurred – investigators noted no signs of physical trauma on her body. But a search of the vehicle turned up several capsules of an unidentified white powder packaged in a plastic bag, a discovery that shifted the case from a routine death investigation into a drug case. Detective Jacob White of the Dallas Police Department’s Narcotics Unit took over from there.
An autopsy later confirmed Peterson had died from a combination of MDMA and fentanyl toxicity.
Digging through Peterson’s phone, detectives found message exchanges with a man later identified as Scott. The two had discussed a drug sale the day before her death, on December 10, working out payment and delivery for that evening. White’s investigation found that Peterson had bought drugs from Scott twice that day.
Scott was arrested on June 19 last year, six months after Peterson’s death – and charged with fentanyl murder, a first-degree felony. Nearly a year later, his guilty plea closed the case.
“Our Narcotics detectives worked this case diligently, and I am proud to see a successful conviction under this new law, which takes a dangerous drug trafficker off the streets for a long time,” Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux said in a statement announcing the conviction.
The Fentanyl Epidemic: A Deadly Trend In Texas
Scott’s conviction follows similar cases prosecuted under the same statute across Texas.
In Denton County, George Howard Cook II, 45, was arrested in July 2025 and charged with murder after investigators tied him to heroin laced with fentanyl that killed 64-year-old Mark Saltsman, who was found dead in his Denton home in December 2024.
A search of Cook’s residence also turned up additional quantities of heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine, adding drug possession charges to the case, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
In Collin County, a jury convicted 26-year-old Noah Gregory Honesty last year for selling fentanyl-laced pills that killed a 25-year-old woman in 2023. Honesty received a 38-year prison sentence.
A similar case also played out in Collin County in May 2025, when 20-year-old Ciana Armour was sentenced to 25 years in prison for selling fentanyl to 17-year-old Mitchel Pultz, a McKinney High School student who died of an overdose in September 2023. Pultz had purchased the drugs from Armour over Instagram. Her guilty plea in the case represented Collin County’s first fentanyl murder conviction.
All four cases stem from House Bill 6, which Texas lawmakers passed to try to help fight the state’s escalating overdose crisis. The law, which has been in effect since September 1, 2023, reclassifies fatal fentanyl overdoses as poisonings and creates the standalone “fentanyl murder” charge, giving prosecutors a path to pursue murder charges against dealers whose product kills the buyer.
A Supply Problem That Isn’t Slowing Down
The recent fentanyl-murder convictions in Texas represent a small piece of a bigger problem.
The DEA seized over 47 million fentanyl-laced pills and nearly 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder nationwide in 2025 alone – enough, by the agency’s own estimate, to have killed more than 369 million people. And the pace hasn’t let up: as of June 15, federal agents had already pulled in roughly 15 million pills and about 5,516 pounds of powder this year, representing around another 133 million doses that never made it to the street.
