Legal Eyes On Riverside County As Fentanyl Death Trial Begins

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CA — Opening statements are set to begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday in a jury trial for a 34-year-old man arrested in Temecula and charged with second-degree murder in connection to a fentanyl death.

The trial is a first in Riverside County, and many more local cases like it are moving through the legal system after a Feb. 2021 promise by District Attorney Mike Hestrin and Sheriff Chad Bianco: The two lawmen vowed, when evidence allows, to charge fentanyl suppliers with murder when their products kill.

Other California district attorneys will be eyeing the Riverside County case. It could set a legal precedent in the state as lawmakers grapple with how to curb sales of the increasingly deadly synthetic opioid.

To date, nearly 30 defendants have been charged in Riverside County with second-degree murder as a result of the local fentanyl crackdown.

Vicente David Romero, 34, is the defendant in Wednesday's case. He was arrested in June 2020 on Temecula's Rancho California Road following the fentanyl death of Kelsey King. He has remained jailed in lieu of $1 million bail.

Second-degree murder convictions in fentanyl-related cases are few in California, despite thousands of statewide deaths from the narcotic. The Golden State lost about 6,000 people to fentanyl and other opioids in 2021, the last year for which complete state data are available.

Last month, Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire announced that a 21-year-old man pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for providing fentanyl to a 15-year-old girl who died shortly after consuming the synthetic opioid in June 2022.

Gire said the Placer County case was California's first murder conviction in connection with a fentanyl death.

The Placer County case bears similarities to the Riverside County case: In both, prosecutors have alleged the defendants knew their products were deadly and the victims were unsuspecting. In the Placer County case, Gire's team was able to prove that Nathaniel Evan Cabacungan knew the Percocet pills he provided to the victim contained fentanyl and were lethal.

Bringing a murder charge in a fentanyl death can be a difficult case to pursue, Greg Totten, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association, told The New York Times last month.

A prosecutor needs to “prove that a drug dealer knew that the activity could lead to death and went ahead with the activity anyway," Totten told the newspaper. “It is a very high standard to prove.”

Hestrin and Bianco have argued that many Riverside County fentanyl victims were unsuspecting — they didn't know the drug they were taking was laced with fentanyl.

The California Legislature has debated several bills aimed at addressing the fentanyl crisis, including measures that would make it easier to pursue serious charges against suppliers.

Advocates like Hestrin and Bianco would like prosecutors to be able to try fentanyl death cases under the “Watson murder rule.” The rule is a legal precedent used in drunken driver cases: When a DUI conviction is handed down, the defendant must sign a document acknowledging that driving under the influence can lead to serious injury and/or death. As a result, if the convicted driver later kills someone in a DUI crash, there is a legal paper trail that makes it easier to try that person on second-degree murder.

If a similar process were used for convicted fentanyl dealers — a signed acknowledgment that their products can kill — advocates like Hestrin and Bianco say it would make prosecutors' jobs easier in some fentanyl death cases.

Overdoses are now a leading cause of death among Americans. Synthetic opioids contributed to 75,000 overdose deaths in 2022, with fentanyl accounting for most of them, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to local public safety officials, there were more than 500 confirmed fentanyl-related fatalities countywide last year, compared to just under 400 in 2021, a 200-fold increase from 2016, when there were only two.

Fentanyl is manufactured in foreign labs, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which says the synthetic opioid is smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border by cartels. The drug is 80-100 times more potent than morphine and can be mixed into any number of street narcotics and prescription drugs, without a user knowing what he or she is consuming. Ingestion of only two milligrams of fentanyl can be fatal.