Indictment Targets ‘Coldblooded’ Drug Dealing

Twenty-nine people have been charged with smuggling and selling heroin and cocaine that led to four fatal overdoses in this well-to-do Dallas suburb.

The federal indictment released Wednesday accuses the defendants of conspiring to distribute black tar heroin and cocaine from Mexico to young adults and juveniles in this city of 188,000.

“The indictment further alleges that the conspirators specifically targeted Plano and the young people of the community of Plano as a new market for their drug, a new market to distribute this deadly poison,” U.S. Atty. Mike Bradford said.

“Despite their knowledge that the young people were dying from the use of this drug, the defendants in a calculated and very coldblooded way distributed [it] with the knowledge that it was killing people,” Bradford told a news conference.

“The devastation that was caused to the Plano community has been overwhelming, with the loss of lives and the ruination of many other lives,” he said.

Plano has seen 20 overdoses, 17 of them deadly, since September 1994. The deaths prompted formation of a task force to investigate.

Paul Villaescusa, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the task force investigated with an eye toward bigger sentences for the participants.

“This is definitely a new twist from dealing with an overdose death as ‘too bad, so sad, you shouldn’t have been doing drugs’ to treating it as almost a homicide and running a full-blown homicide investigation,” he said.

The suspects range in age from 18 to 38. Most are in their early 20s and were already in custody on state and federal charges. Dozens of federal agents and local police officers arrested 10 of the others in early morning raids Wednesday, and one suspect was still at large. Twenty-four of the defendants could face prison sentences of 20 years to life.

There is no law that allows Texas or federal prosecutors to charge a drug seller with manslaughter or assault if the drugs cause a fatal overdose.

Relatives of those killed by heroin welcomed the indictments.

“The quicker they put these people out of commission, put them in prison, the better,” Lowell Hill told local television station WFAA. His son Robert died at his home in August 1997 after snorting heroin.