A North Texas man pleaded guilty to charges related to distributing fentanyl-laced pills to a Carrollton middle schooler who died after overdosing.
Rafael Soliz Jr., 23, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute fentanyl before U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee Harris Toliver on Thursday, according to a news release from the DEA. He admitted to selling over 1,500 pills laced with fentanyl.
Soliz further confessed that he had sold the laced pills to other drug dealers and even children, a crime that DEA Special Agent in Charge Eduardo A. Chávez said is a major priority of the agency.
“Anyone selling fentanyl to children will find themselves becoming a top priority for the Drug Enforcement Administration,” said Chávez in the news release. “The DEA will continue to focus our resources on stopping this deadly threat from reaching and causing more harm to our next generation.”
Soliz’s plea papers, as detailed in the DEA’s press release, described how he had come into contact with the teenage victim through social media, a popular method among dealers, as covered in The Dallas Express.
The 13-year-old girl, who attended Dewitt Perry Middle School in Carrollton, messaged Soliz in November 2022 and eventually asked to buy “percs,” according to the news release. Soliz said he agreed to sell the girl drugs and even taught her how to snort them.
Even after discovering the girl’s age, Soliz continued to sell her drugs and told her to “keep it on the down low,” the release states.
Soliz told the girl to delete their messages on December 9, 2022. Two days later, she was found dead in her bedroom.
The autopsy found her death was an overdose from combining fentanyl and cough medicine.
U.S. Attorney Leigha Simonton released a statement condemning Soliz’s actions and promising to do everything possible to prevent more deadly run-ins with fentanyl.
“My heart aches for the victim in this case — a promising young girl who’d barely entered her teens. The defendant not only sold her fentanyl but also taught her how to ingest it. In essence, he encouraged a mere child to snort a terrifyingly potent, highly addictive drug — and then urged her to cover for him with law enforcement,” said Simonton, per the DEA.
“The Northern District of Texas is pulling out all the stops to rid the streets of dealers and keep fentanyl out of the hands of our kids. Our community cannot endure much more of this,” Simonton added.
Soliz has not been sentenced but could receive up to 40 years. He was the fifth person charged with a fentanyl-related crime after four children overdosed in North Texas since last September, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
Drug crimes also plague nearby Dallas. Reliable crime statistics on drug crimes are unavailable, allegedly due to a ransomware attack against the City’s computer servers, but in the first four months of the year, 3,542 drug and narcotic violations were reported by the City.
Such crime is allowed to continue in part due to a staffing shortage in the Dallas Police Department. The Dallas Observer previously said that 4,000 officers was the City’s target number. At present, DPD is currently employing only roughly 3,100.
To target crime hotspots, some cities have dedicated police patrols and private security monitoring their city centers. In the case of Fort Worth, this initiative could be contributing to its lower crime rate relative to Dallas.
