Fentanyl; sanctuary cities & states

Federal authorities charged three people Wednesday with supplying the fentanyl that killed a father and his 13-month-old son in Santa Rosa in September, while also revealing the drugs came from Honduran dealers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

U.S. Attorney David Anderson charged Leanna Zamora, Lindsay Williams and Shane Cratty with distribution of fentanyl resulting in serious bodily injury and death in the fatal overdoses of 29-year-old Patrick O’Neill and his son Liam. Zamora and Williams were arrested and in custody in California, and police arrested Cratty on Tuesday night in Texas, officials said.

O’Neill and his son were found unresponsive in a home on the 200 block of Darek Drive on Sept. 14. Liam died at the scene from “acute fentanyl intoxication.” O’Neill was revived with Narcan, but he went into cardiac arrest and died two days later when his family took him off life support, authorities said.

Anderson announced the charges at a press conference in San Francisco to highlight the increasing reach of the city’s fentanyl epidemic and give updates on a recent initiative aimed at cracking down on drug dealers in the notoriously drug-plagued neighborhood.

“When we tolerate this open-air drug market in the heart of our city, the harms that it creates are not contained to the neighborhood where this drug market exists,” Anderson said. “Open-air drug markets attract evil and export misery, despair and, as this case demonstrates, sometimes even death.”

In August, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Drug Enforcement Administration announced charges against 32 Honduran nationals who allegedly took part in a complex drug trafficking operation extending from the Bay Area to the southern U.S. border and up to Seattle.

The defendants were allegedly part of a larger enterprise that has led to a proliferation of narcotics like fentanyl and heroin in San Francisco, particularly in the Tenderloin where federal authorities have said dealers set up on street corners after traveling into the city from the East Bay.

Since announcing the crack-down, Anderson said the U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged and arrested more than 100 defendants. He also responded to Matt Haney, the neighborhood’s representative on the city Board of Supervisors, who recently “requested additional resources and coordination” with federal law enforcement officials.

Anderson suggested that coordination between local and federal agencies “is scrutinized, sometimes after the fact, for possible immigration consequences” due to how the city’s sanctuary policy is applied. The city also forced its Police Department to withdraw from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2017, creating further barriers to cooperation and coordination between local and federal agencies, Anderson said.

“I do not presume to understand the array of political pressures that bear on your work,” Anderson wrote in a letter to Haney. “I would simply urge you, as an important local policymaker, to assess the real-life implications of the restrictions imposed on local law enforcement and other local policy choices.”

Haney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fentanyl, which is estimated to be around 40 times stronger than heroin, has had a particularly devastating effect on the Bay Area in recent years, surpassing prescription drugs and heroin as the leading cause of opioid overdose deaths in San Francisco.

In 2010, the city reported six overdose deaths from fentanyl. Last year, that number hit 57.

Authorities said the drug’s devastation isn’t limited to the squalid alleys and street corners of the Tenderloin, a fact underscored by O’Neill and Liam’s deaths more than 60 miles away in Santa Rosa.

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