The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s office has announced the first conviction under the new overdose law that allows prosecutors to seek murder charges for individuals who sell fentanyl-laced drugs that cause overdose deaths.
Kaeden Farish, 19, of Azle, pled guilty to murder charges on October 22 in Fort Worth. Farish sold fentanyl-laced pills to a 17-year-old on January 20, 2024. The juvenile later died of an overdose.
“We are working hard to get the people who sell this poison off the streets,” Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells said.
Fentanyl is the most lethal drug currently on the market and is commonly added to many street drugs to increase potency. The drug is commonly manufactured in components that are easily smuggled from China into South America and then transported over the Southern border into the United States. The synthetic opioid is commonly pressed into pills known on the street as China Girl, Murder 8, and Apache, according to the National Health Institute.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that nearly 108,000 Americans died from fentanyl-laced drug overdoses in 2022. The number of overdose deaths from the drug has rapidly increased in recent years, rising more than double from 2015, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“We are holding people accountable in Tarrant County,” Sorrells said. “We are doing everything we can to keep our community safe. We will continue to go after those who seek to profit from this deadly drug. You make it or deal it to someone who dies, we’ll charge you with murder.”
According to the press release, the conviction is the first under the state’s new laws, which were passed in 2023.
“This conviction is the first in Tarrant County under the new Texas law allowing prosecutors to charge individuals with murder if they make or deal fentanyl that causes death,” the press release reads.
While the current conviction is the first of its kind, it is unlikely to be the last or only conviction secured under the current laws in Texas that aim to hold drug dealers accountable.
In 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott launched the border security initiative Operation Lone Star to “detect and repel illegal crossings, arrest human smugglers and cartel gang members, and stop the flow of deadly drugs like fentanyl into our nation,” according to the governor’s website. More than 521 million lethal doses of fentanyl — enough to kill every man, woman, and child in the U.S. and Mexico combined — have been seized by Texas law enforcement, per the governor’s update.