A local mother’s account of being rebuffed by her son’s school before he died of an overdose coincided with a Justice Department news release detailing the arrests of accused drug dealers who may have been responsible.
Lilia Astudillo told The Dallas Morning News that she tried to get help from her 14-year-old son’s middle school in Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District (CFBISD) when she suspected he might have been using drugs.
“I didn’t get help … They didn’t want to help me,” she said of the school staff, speaking with the DMN.
Her son died in late January, but his cause of death remains to be determined pending test results. If his tests come back positive for fentanyl, he would have been the fourth fatality and 10th juvenile to overdose on illegal drugs sold in and around their CFBISD schools, according to a U.S. Justice Department news release.
So far, three teenagers in the district have died after overdosing on fentanyl since September 2022, reported WFAA.
The overdose deaths are allegedly linked to a house where drugs were distributed near R.L. Turner High. The same drugs were also making their way into Astudillo’s son’s school, Dan F. Long Middle.
“Schools aren’t safe anymore,” Astudillo said to the DMN. “I don’t want anyone to go through what I’m going through.”
Seven other confirmed overdoses (one victim overdosed twice), which were not fatal — making 10 confirmed in total– have been linked to the drug house. The news release stated the victims were between 13 and 17 years old.
“Luis Eduardo Navarrete, 21, and Magaly Mejia Cano, 29, were charged via criminal complaint with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl. They were arrested at Mr. Navarrete’s residence in Carrollton on Friday and made their initial appearances Monday afternoon,” read the release.
Eight R.L. Turner High students between the ages of 14 and 16 allegedly helped distribute the “M30” pills that contained fentanyl.
Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted about the case, saying, “The fentanyl crisis plaguing our country has tragic consequences.”
“Too many Texas families have lost children to deadly fentanyl,” Abbott said. “Their loss will not be in vain. This session, we will make fentanyl poisoning a murder charge in Texas.”
In January, detectives began surveilling the suspects’ Carrollton home. Police said the suspects were seen conducting “hand-to-hand transactions with multiple individuals” and alleged that at least some of those sales were to teens known to be students at R.L. Turner High School, according to an affidavit obtained by WFAA.
The affidavit said that a 14-year-old girl who overdosed had purchased “M30” pills from both a teenage dealer and from Navarrete personally.
“Law enforcement conducting surveillance at Mr. Navarrete’s home observed him engage in a hand-to-hand transaction with another 16-year-old dealer on January 12, 2023. Officers followed the juvenile into a bathroom at R.L. Turner, where he holed up in a stall to snort the drugs. He later admitted that he’d obtained the pills – which he called ‘perc pills’ – from Mr. Navarrete,” read the news release.
A U.S. attorney called the alleged actions of Cano and Navarrete “despicable.”
“To deal fentanyl is to knowingly imperil lives,” said Leigha Simonton, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, per the news release. “To deal fentanyl to minors — naive middle and high school students — is to shatter futures.”
According to the DMN, CFBISD issued a statement on Monday that stated school officials were “deeply concerned about the safety and well-being” of their students, citing the growing prevalence of fentanyl across North Texas and the rest of the nation.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, serious overdoses — tracked by Dallas Fire-Rescue — have been increasing at a staggering rate in Dallas over the last few years.
Meanwhile, the City has seen an unchecked wave of reported drug offenses, totaling roughly 20,000 different crimes in the last two years alone, clocking 985 year-to-date, according to statistics from the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard.