NYC Dealer Sold Fentanyl That Killed Pregnant Woman, Feds Says

BROOKLYN, NY — A Lower East Side man sold fentanyl that killed a pregnant woman in West Virginia, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. Edward "Super Ed" Carrillo also distributed cocaine that his associates sold as crack in Long Island City's Queensbridge housing project.

He was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison Tuesday.

Carrillo, 43, pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to distribute fentanyl, an often deadly opioid painkiller that's 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Federal investigators traced pills he sold to the 2015 drug overdose in West Virginia, prosecutors said. Six other men from Brooklyn, Long Island City and West Virginia were also charged in December 2016 in working along Carillo.

"What started as a local investigation targeting a crack cocaine distribution organization turned into a murder mystery upon the death of a young pregnant mother in West Virginia," said James Hunt, a special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration, which handled the investigation.

"Fentanyl doesn't discriminate against users, nor do drug dealers whose only concern is profit."

Carrillo, then a resident of the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side, and his associates sold "substantial amounts" of fentanyl to West Virginia, where opioid overdose deaths rose more than 20 percent from 2012 to 2015, prosecutors said.

Carrillo and his partners in West Virginia seemed to know their drugs caused a young woman to overdose there in April 2015, prosecutors said. Wiretapped phone calls caught one of his co-conspirators saying she "went out" and repeating the term "OD."

In all, Carrillo was responsible for trafficking at least 280 grams of crack cocaine, at least 400 grams of fentanyl and an "unspecified amount" of marijuana, according to court records.

Carrillo sold cocaine to another man, Johnnie "Nut" Monroe of Brooklyn, who "cooked" it into crack cocaine that low-level drug dealers sold throughout the Queensbridge housing complex, prosecutors alleged in court papers.

One of those dealers, Terrell Carmichael of Long Island City, was sentenced in November to 51 months in prison for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, prosecutors said. The other four defendants in the case are still awaiting sentencing.

(Lead image: Bags of heroin, some laced with fentanyl, are pictured in September 2016. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)