She sold an unsuspecting user deadly fentanyl. Now she’s guilty in his death

SARNIA – A Sarnia drug dealer who sold cocaine laced with deadly fentanyl to an unsuspecting buyer pleaded guilty Thursday to criminal negligence causing death.

Karen Ebel-Savage, 59, also pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in the 38-year-old man’s death in August 2017.

The man, identified in court as Daniel Lapointe, died in what’s now considered to be the early days of the epidemic use of fentanyl, a powerful opioid drug, estimated to be 100 times stronger than morphine, that has tightened its deadly grip across the region.

Ebel-Savage was arrested on August 11, 2017, two days after the man, found in the 700 block of Indian Road, died at hospital from a drug overdose.

Sarnia police searched Ebel-Savage’s home and found a small amount of crack cocaine. She was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a controlled substance.

Seven months later, on March 13, 2018, after police said they had obtained “further evidence,” Ebel-Savage was re-arrested and charged with manslaughter.

Thursday, she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of criminal negligence causing death.

Ebel-Savage’s guilty pleas are the same as the guilty pleas of William Knapp, 37, of Norwich Township, near Woodstock, who was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison a year ago for selling a 50-milligram fentanyl patch to Carolyn de Wit, 32.

De Wit died on Jan. 25, 2016 in the bathroom stall at the Norwich restaurant where she worked just 10 minutes after buying the patch from Knapp, her husband’s cousin, in the parking lot.

The painkiller was part of Knapp’s personal prescriptions to treat a chronic, hereditary nerve disease.

Knapp, who had developed a tolerance for a wide range of painkillers, was one of the first in Ontario to be sent to prison in a fentanyl overdose case. Superior Court Justice Thomas Heeney accepted the joint sentencing submission in the case only because the drug came from Knapp’s own prescription.

But the judge added that the sentence shouldn’t be considered a starting point for other sentences in deadly fentanyl trafficking cases.

Since then, communities across the region have been struggling to deal with the growing drug crisis. Police and public health officials have issued warnings about the drug and implored users to have naloxone kits – an antidote to the overdoses – on-hand whenever they’re using street drugs.

There have been warnings that fentanyl might be quietly mixed into other street drugs, meaning some users will unknowingly take the drug, which is far more powerful than what their body is used to handling.

Just last month, fears that a toxic batch of drugs had made its way into Southwestern Ontario prompted more warnings, after a spike in fatal overdoses from Sarnia to Brantford. The deaths attributed to suspected overdoses including a teenager from Woodstock.

Criminal cases similar to the one in Sarnia have started cropping up across the region.

In Norfolk County last month, Morgan Fick, 21, and Carilyn Deming, 23, were charged with manslaughter and trafficking fentanyl after Ashley Gravelle, 32, of Port Dover, died on March 2.

This week, Braden Fitzgerald, 39, of Simcoe was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking in large quantities of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine and hydromorphone in Simcoe and Woodstock. At his sentencing, the court heard that there have been at least 655 deaths in Canada from 2009 to 2014, where fentanyl has been the cause or a contributing factor.

Said federal Crown attorney Jamie Pereira: “Protection of the public in this case is very important.”

WHAT ARE OPIOIDS?

• Opioids are highly addictive painkillers, also called narcotics, made from opium poppies or synthesized in a lab.
• There are many different kinds of prescription and illicit opioids with varying strengths, including morphine, heroin, hydromorphone, oxycodone and fentanyl.
• Prescription opioids such as OxyContin can be abused by patients or diverted to the streets, where they may be smoked, crushed and snorted or injected by drug users.
• Opioids have been implicated in more than 2,000 deaths nationwide in the first half of 2018 alone.
  In the London area, there were 42 opioid-related deaths between January and October 2018.

WHAT IS FENTANYL?

• Fentanyl is a hyper-potent, lab-made opioid 100 times more powerful than morphine. As little as two milligrams of the drug, the equivalent of about four grains of salt, can kill a first-time user. It easily can be mixed into other drugs and is difficult to detect.

HOW DOES FENTANYL GET ON OUR STREETS?

• Prescription gel fentanyl patches used to manage severe chronic pain can be sold on the streets, where the drug is smoked, ingested or dried into a powder.
• Illegal powdered fentanyl, made in overseas labs and smuggled into Canada, can be cut into other drugs or pressed into tablets made to look like prescription pills.
• Organized crime plays a role in selling and distributing illicit fentanyl, Middlesex London Health Unit chief medical officer of health Chris Mackie says.

WHAT MAKES FENTANYL ATTRACTIVE TO DRUG USERS?

• Sometimes drug users end up with fentanyl accidentally when it’s cut into another drug they want. Other times they seek it out, said Ken Lee, lead physician at Canadian Mental Health Association Middlesex’s addiction medicine clinic. It’s powerful and cheaper, he said. “The people I see know that they’re using fentanyl,” Lee said. His patients report pharmaceutical-grade hydromorphone goes for $60 a point, one-tenth of a gram, on the street. “A point of fentanyl is much stronger and will last a lot longer. It’s cheaper than buying the known pharmaceutical-grade pills,” Lee said.

WHAT MAKES FENTANYL USEFUL TO DRUG DEALERS?

• Non-users might wonder, why mix in a drug that could kill your customers? For dealers, the benefit is that slipping fentanyl into another kind of illegal drug can increase the high buyers get from using it, and mixing in fentanyl also lets dealers stretch out their supply of the more expensive drugs — say, heroin — that they’re selling.

NOT ALL FENTANYL IS CREATED EQUAL

• Fentanyl made in clandestine labs can vary batch by batch, Lee said. It can be weak or very strong and can contain fentanyl relatives including carfentanil — an elephant tranquilizer that’s 10,000 times stronger than morphine — mixed in. Some officials have  wondered if a recent rash of Southwestern Ontario overdoses, both fatal and non-fatal, may be the result of a “toxic” batch of fentanyl hitting the region.