Two people have been arrested in the sale of a deadly batch of fentanyl that police said targeted a neighborhood near the Southwest Waterfront in January and killed nine people.
At least five other people who overdosed on the same batch had survived but were rushed to hospitals in what one lawmaker described as a tragic mass casualty event.
Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight
At a news conference Wednesday, D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III called fentanyl a “poison that is being peddled in our community.” He added: “The amount of fentanyl it takes to take a person’s life, you can barely see with a naked eye.” Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 100 times more powerful than morphine and up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.
Story continues below advertisement
The police veteran of 33 years called the nine overdose deaths from one batch of drugs “probably the worst I’ve heard of.”
Advertisement
D.C. police, the FBI and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration conducted the investigation that resulted in the arrest of Sheldon Marbley, 43, and Shameka Hayes, 23, both of Northwest Washington. Each has been charged with three counts of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and cocaine; two of those counts include distribution of drugs resulting in substantial bodily injury.
Police said the drug overdoses began showing up the morning of Jan. 28 around Half and O streets SW, near Nationals Park, and continued throughout the day.
Story continues below advertisement
But even then, the full scale of the deadly toll wasn’t yet known, with authorities initially linking three deaths to the drug batch.
Most people died that day and in that one neighborhood, though police said some deaths occurred in other parts of the city. In at least one case, a person who died wasn’t found until February. The deaths weren’t connected until tests from autopsies were finalized.
Advertisement
The ages of the nine people who died ranged from 43 to 74 years old. Five were women. Eight of the victims lived in Southeast and Southwest Washington; one had no fixed address. One family of a victim reached on Wednesday said they had not known their loved one died of a drug overdose; relatives of another said the person had disappeared from home 15 years ago and never resurfaced.
Story continues below advertisement
D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the public safety committee, rushed to the neighborhood as paramedics began treating patients, jumping from person to person to preform CPR.
He recalled seeing sick and dying people on streets and in alleys, and loved ones crying in front of their homes.
“It’s really hard to explain how so many lives got snuffed out in a moment,” Allen said after learning of the arrests. He said he knew a person who died that day.
Advertisement
Marbley and Hayes each made brief, separate appearances in U.S. District Court on Wednesday and were ordered detained. Detention hearings for both are set for Monday. Attorneys for Marbley and Hayes did not address the allegations in the criminal complaint at the hearings.
Story continues below advertisement
In a search warrant filed in court on Wednesday, police said surveillance video shows several people purchasing suspected drugs from a man and woman parked in a Mazda “shortly before they died.”
Authorities said that victims who survived told police they thought they were purchasing cocaine and that two identified Marbley and Hayes from pictures shown by police. Surviving victims said they had made purchases from the same people many times in the past, but on this occasion, the suspected drugs were packaged differently than before and were in capsules, according to the search warrant affidavit.
Advertisement
Opioid deaths in the District have nearly doubled from 2018 to 2021, according to statistics from the city. The D.C. medical examiner has identified fentanyl in more than 90 percent of the overdose deaths in 2020 and through March 2021.
Story continues below advertisement
Statistics for this year were not yet available. Fatal opioid overdoses also spiked last year in Maryland and Virginia, and across the country. Experts in large part attribute the increase to people left isolated from treatment, work, friends and school during the pandemic.
Opioid deaths surged during coronavirus pandemic in D.C., Virginia and Maryland
District officials said many of the people who overdosed in Southwest Washington in January were older, long-term drug users.
Edwin Chapman, a doctor in private practice who has been treating patients with opioid addiction for the past 22 years in D.C., said fatal overdoses in the District disproportionately affect Black people, who account for about 80 percent of deaths.
Advertisement
An increase in deaths has also occurred among adults between the ages of 70 to 79, Chapman said.
Story continues below advertisement
“It appears that our older generation is dying out, so to speak,” he said. “These are generally older opioid users whose drug supply has been infiltrated or contaminated with fentanyl.”
Westminster Presbyterian Church is located near the area in Southwest that was impacted in January, and it lost a longtime parishioner to the fentanyl batch. Co-pastor Brian Hamilton described the 72-year-old woman who died as a “pillar of the community” she lived in for the past half-century. The day the fentanyl hit the streets, the woman’s daughter found her unconscious in her kitchen.
“It was absolutely devastating,” Hamilton said. “It had a chilling effect for everyone who knew her.”
Story continues below advertisement
The pastor was among those who rushed to the neighborhood when the overdose calls began the morning of Jan. 28. The calls for help, he said, “just kept going.”
Fatal opioid overdoses are up by the hundreds, devastating families and worrying officials
George Kerr III, an elder at the Westminster church who helps people through addiction, said “we have a lot of trauma in this city” due to drug overdoses.
Advertisement
“It is an ongoing epidemic and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares,” Kerr said.
Kerr noted it can take as long as three months for the medical examiner to determine causes of death, but he said residents need to know sooner if fentanyl or some other drug is involved. He suggests the creation of a government dashboard to track overdose deaths in same way such tools are used to track covid-19 deaths.
Story continues below advertisement
Allen said the city has made strides in combating the opioid epidemic, such as police using a drug that reverses overdoses to keep fentanyl users alive. But, he said, public attention to the deaths is lacking, as are ways to help people suffering from long-term addiction.
While Allen supports finding alternatives to prosecuting and jailing people who are addicted, he said he fully backs arresting people who put fentanyl on the streets.
The episode put the entire neighborhood on edge.
“For the next day,” Allen said, “any time someone heard a siren in Southwest, someone was convinced it was another overdose.”