When the fentanyl crisis began, most of its victims were adults. But as ProPublica reports, the rate of overdose deaths among teens has been surging since the pandemic. The outlet's in-depth story by Lizzie Presser brings home that truth by looking at how the lives of two Wisconsin teens intersected in lethal fashion. The short version is that 15-year-old Maylia Sotelo sold 17-year-old Jack McDonough counterfeit "M30" Percocet pills in late 2022 that contained fentanyl. After he died of an overdose, Sotelo became the first Wisconsin juvenile to be charged with homicide related to a fentanyl death. She would plead no contest and is now serving a 10-year sentence. The story, however, well beyond those details, traces how Sotelo came to be selling those pills and how McDonough came to be buying them.
Sotelo's "childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers," writes Presser, and her mother was a violent addict. Sotelo started dealing pot at age 13 and graduated to "percs," which suppliers purported to be Percocets but were actually fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin that quickly got buyers such as McDonough hooked. One bitter irony of McDonough's overdose is that it happened after a local drug task force had purchased pills from Sotelo and had her on its radar. As the case unfolded, McDonough's mother, Carrie, found herself wrestling with why she'd come to feel "strangely protective" of Sotelo. "Maybe this is part of it," she says. "I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn't have a mother. So, it's like, I'm childless, she's motherless, and we're in this situation together, but against each other." (Read the full story.)
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