His death certificate calls it an accident, but that has never helped Shawn Bazile understand how her son ended up dead in the water.
A homeless man found Devin Bazile, 35, hitting up against a pier below a walkway along the Mississippi River at Gov. Nicholls Street. The synthetic opioid fentanyl was among several drugs the coroner found in his system.
Part of an explosion of fatal overdoses in New Orleans, Bazile’s death in August 2021 came less than two months after police put out a “be on the lookout” alert for him. He’d witnessed a shooting up close in the Ninth Ward, his mother said, and became a target. Shawn Bazile said she got word he was given a “hot shot,” a toxic drug bomb meant to kill, but no detective would pursue the tip.
“There’s so much that goes on in the streets that people don’t know about,” said Bazile, who now raises her 13-year-old grandson. “To find the sheer amount of drugs in his system — how did he get there? There are no answers, and no avenues to pursue if police don’t. It doesn’t help the heartbreak.”
Fighting the surge
She isn’t alone in her dismay. A surge of fatal overdoses since 2020 across the New Orleans area has claimed more than 1,000 lives per year. Few spawn murder cases — whether against dealer, fellow user, or relative — according to local district attorneys.
Whether police and prosecutors should go harder to lock up local suppliers of lethal drugs draws debate among academics, users and torn-up family members. Critics argue that treating local drug dealers as intentional killers often miscasts blame for a scourge fueled by Mexican drug cartels working with cheap chemicals from China.
District attorneys and federal prosecutors in the New Orleans area have taken varied approaches to an epidemic of fentanyl deaths.
In Orleans Parish, District Attorney Jason Williams' office identified a few pending homicide cases resulting from overdose deaths, in response to a request.
In June, prosecutors secured an indictment on murder and drug charges against Shawn Strickler, a Florida man who called 911 from a room at a Bourbon Street hotel two years ago after Zachary Hovsepian, also of Florida, died in Room 540, which was registered to Stricker. Police found a backpack with drugs in the bathroom, a police report says.
A second Orleans Parish case was first prosecuted under Williams' predecessor, Leon Cannizzaro, and reflects some of the challenges in pursuing drug dealers for murder.
A New Orleans jury convicted Michael Willis on several drug charges in 2020. But it deadlocked on a murder count for allegedly supplying the mix of heroin and fentanyl — sold through another person — that Branden Pelot of Luling took before his overdose death.
Louisiana law lets prosecutors charge the one who gave the fatal drugs, or that person's supplier, with murder. But the jury wasn’t buying it in a trial featuring testimony that both killer and victim worked as confidential informants, Willis for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and Pelot for the FBI. Willis is awaiting a retrial on the murder charge.
"The street level narcotics trade kills our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters every day. Vigorous prosecution of narcotics traffickers is a vital tool in the fight against this senseless death toll," Williams' office said in a statement.
"Drug-induced homicide" laws like Louisiana's exist in more than two dozen states, and their use has reportedly risen nationally to meet a crisis in fentanyl overdoses. One review last year, of data from 92 counties across 10 states, suggested that they work, helping reduce opioid deaths.
Critics argue that study was flawed, and that those prosecutions run counter to Good Samaritan laws that aim to encourage 911 calls when someone overdoses. Booking dealers or co-users also hikes the chances of an overdose upon release, according to the advocacy group Action Lab.
Mothers on trial
In Jefferson Parish, where 350 overdose deaths in 2021 trailed only Orleans Parish statewide, District Attorney Paul Connick’s office appears to be taking a bit of a different approach.
Connick's office secured guilty pleas on drug and other charges, but refused murder charges, against two recent defendants accused of furnishing deadly drugs. One of them, Dwight Bevley, was locked up and allegedly supplied another jail inmate with deadly fentanyl.
But Connick's office has pressed murder charges against four mothers accused in the deaths of their young children from drugs.
Lana Cristina of Kenner is charged with killing her 4-day-old newborn with fentanyl from her breast milk. Brandie Froeba allegedly fed her baby meth-tainted breast milk in 2018. Alexis Callero allegedly poisoned her 20-month-old toddler, Leo, with fentanyl. And Autumn Blansett killed her 3-month-old baby with meth in 2020, prosecutors allege.
Froeba, who was alleged to have passed tainted drugs previously to another child, pleaded guilty in July and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The three other indicted mothers have pleaded not guilty and await trial.
It makes little sense to Louis Dutel of Bush, whose adult son died of an overdose in Kenner in February, under circumstances he considers criminal. Devon Dutel was a 33-year-old artist who worked as a cook before spiraling into opioids, his father said.
“He was a household name in the local ERs,” Louis Dutel said.
Devon was on an ankle monitor when he died at the home of a longtime drug associate. It showed he'd been there for two days before then, Dutel said. His son had ingested fentanyl and the tranquilizer Xylazine, an animal sedative that has grown more common in overdose deaths, federal data show.
Dutel said his “hounding” of law enforcement resulted only in relatively minor drug charges for the man he suspects contributed to his son’s death.
“They prosecute a girl whose baby died of fentanyl, and they won’t prosecute this (expletive),” he said. “What’s the criminal intent there? A breast in your mouth is a criminal act? No, it’s not. Did any of these girls get a chance to go get treatment? I actually feel heartache for them.”
Connick's office declined to explain the prevalence of murder charges against mothers for their childrens' deaths.
"In making its charging decisions, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office considers all available evidence required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused person is criminally responsible for the death of the individual," the office said in a statement.
A tough prosecution
Prosecutors point to a high bar for pinning a death on a drug dealer.
“I have to be able to show the dealers supplied those specific drugs, and the consumption of those controlled substances was the direct cause of the death of the victim,” said Collin Sims, criminal division chief under Warren Montgomery, the district attorney for St. Tammany and Washington parishes.
“It really stems from the toxicology, what’s in the victim’s system.”
Montgomery’s office is pursuing murder charges against several alleged drug dealers who furnished fatal doses, including at least three from deaths last year.
Among them, a grand jury in May indicted Ronald Craig Reynolds on charges of second-degree murder and distribution of fentanyl over the drug overdose death last year of Donald Ribarich, of Slidell.
Last year, Montgomery’s office indicted an alleged Covington drug dealer and a woman who allegedly bought counterfeit pills from him and furnished them to a 15-year-old family member, who died. A lab analysis revealed fentanyl, which killed 210 people in the parish over the past two years, according to the coroner.
“Everybody knows fentanyl is a killer. The attitude of people on the north shore is that offenders need to be responsible for their actions,” said Montgomery.
Federal involvement
On rare occasions, federal prosecutors in New Orleans have sought charges against dealers for distributing drugs that kill. U.S. Attorney Duane Evans is prosecuting dozens of cases involving fentanyl, however, including some that seem to implicate defendants in homicides.
Bradford Byerley, special agent in charge of the DEA’s four-state New Orleans Field Division, describes a flood of fentanyl landing in New Orleans, which he called a staging area for drugs coming into the U.S. from Mexico.
“We have drug trafficking organizations in the New Orleans area that we can directly link back to the cartels,” Byerley said.
Byerley pointed to progress in some recent high-profile national cases targeting the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, viewed as the dominant sources of clandestine fentanyl in the U.S. Locally, he pointed to an increase in drug seizures under a yearlong operation that ended in May.
Those takes often included fake pills, indistinguishable from pharmaceuticals such as Oxycodone, Percocet and Xanax, but containing potentially deadly amounts of fentanyl, he said.
Street busts the solution?
The epidemic of overdose deaths that has raged for three years across the New Orleans region has done so with little national attention, unlike in places like Portland, Oregon, where critics have cast blame for a surge of overdose deaths on the city's embrace of more permissive, stay-out-of-jail policies for street drug users.
Yet Portland’s overdose death rate pales to that of the New Orleans area, regardless of parish or the tactics of prosecutors. In 2021, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes all experienced drug overdose death rates far higher than Portland, and on a level with San Francisco. The rate in Orleans is higher still.
Brandon del Pozo, a Brown University professor who worked for 19 years as a New York City police officer and served as police chief in Burlington, Vermont, pointed to downsides of a strategy of aggressive street busts as a solution to the overdose epidemic.
A study that del Pozo co-authored, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that opioid-related police seizures in one Indiana county were linked to increases in nearby overdoses, as users scrambled for less reliable hookups.
“The margin of error in fentanyl is tiny,” del Pozo said. “If you lock people up for a few weeks and put them out on the street, you have elevated the risk up to 40-fold, screwing with their system, lowering their tolerance. They take the drugs again, it overpowers them, and they die.”
He described “arteries of fentanyl coming into the country” that law enforcement must focus on while pushing treatment locally.
“By the time it gets to New Orleans, it’s capillaries, putting drugs into street corners and homes,” del Pozo said.
'like ghosts'
For their part, users differ on whether dealers who deliver toxic loads of fentanyl should face stiff punishment, said Brian Imakura, a New Orleans filmmaker who quit using after an overdose in 2018.
Imakura, who has interviewed several people coming through the Avenues Recovery Center in New Orleans for a documentary, said he's against it.
“It can’t be overstated, specifically in terms of drugs, how uneducated a lot of people are" to the physiological effects, he said.
Imakura said he knows several people who have died of overdoses, though more often he's left to guess over the addicts he hasn't seen in awhile.
“If I texted them now, they wouldn’t respond,” he said. “That’s part of the weird thing about it. People kind of feel like ghosts. There’s no big announcement, ‘Oh this person died.’ No one’s saying that.”
