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By Anezka Pichrtova
Live News Reporter
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A 23-year-old man has been arrested in connection to the death of a 17-year-old believed to be his girlfriend who overdosed on fentanyl two years ago.
Michael Garcia was arrested Monday by police officers of the Riverside County Department in the El Centro area in Imperial County, California, and returned to Indio, according to local news outlet The Dessert Sun.
On August 21, 2022, officers from the Palm Desert Sheriff's Station were called to an unresponsive 17-year-old girl in an apartment block in the Desert Hot Springs. The response team's efforts to save the girl's life were unsuccessful and she was pronounced dead, according to a statement from the Sheriff's office.
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An investigation determined that the girl had overdosed on fentanyl. Her boyfriend, then 20-year-old Garcia, was named as a suspect but the police could not locate him, the police reported.
Police asked the U.S. Marshals Service to help locate Garcia and it was believed he fled to Mexico. Several law enforcement agencies were reportedly deployed to find him and a little over two years after his girlfriend died, Garcia was arrested at the U.S.-Mexican border accused of "unlawfully furnishing a controlled substance to a minor and felony child endangerment."
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According to the police statement, the investigators identified other suspects and the investigation is still ongoing. Garcia is set to appear in court early Thursday morning, according to inmate records provided by the sheriff. His bond was set at $75,000.
Newsweek has contacted the sheriff's station for further information.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine and can be found in various forms, such as patches, powder, or "mimicking pharmaceutical drugs".
According to data from UCLA Health, around 22 adolescents died from overdose every week in the U.S. in 2022. They also note that the rise in deaths from overdose among children is not because more people are using, but rather because the drugs on the market are getting deadlier. Their data also suggest the number of "12th graders had fallen from about 21 percent to 8 percent in the 20 years since 2002."
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are the leading cause of overdose in the U.S. with around 74,702 people dying in 2023, as Newsweek previously reported.
According to the preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 12,200 people died from drug overdose in California from March 2023 to March 2024.
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