The usage of a kind of drug called fentanyl has gotten a young mother Diamond Lynch’s killed, which left a lot of questions and triggers for investigation.
The search commenced from her phone which led the authorities to find where she got the drugs that killed her, a trail that stretched from Washington, D.C., to California to Mexico.
It began with the death of a 20-year-old mom, just a month after her baby boy’s first birthday. She was one of 70,000 Americans lost to the scourge of fentanyl in 2021.
Police officers couldn’t save Diamond Lynch, who overdosed in her Washington, D.C., apartment after taking a pill laced with the powerful and dangerous chemical opiate. But they quickly began investigating how she died, with the help of federal prosecutors and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Starting with some text messages and a handful of pills, authorities unraveled a massive fentanyl distribution network that extended from the D.C. area to California to Mexico.
So far, 25 people have been charged. Court documents say the dealers did business largely in the open, largely on Instagram, and smuggled fentanyl-laced pills in candy boxes. The pills were made to look like Percocet and other pharmaceutical opiates.
It’s part of a DEA initiative called “OD Justice,” an effort to work backward from overdose deaths to try to hold traffickers accountable and make a dent in the flow of fentanyl.
“We are doing hundreds of investigations like this across the United States,” Anne Milgram, head of the DEA, told NBC News.
Investigators used messages on Diamond Lynch’s phone to find the dealers who sold her the fatal dose, Milgram said. “Then we expanded it out to who was supplying them. We traced that back to Los Angeles, San Diego and ultimately to Mexico.”
In an investigation dubbed “Operation Blues Brothers,” after the color of the deadly pills, federal agents benefitted from the carelessness of the accused drug traffickers, who communicated via social media messages that can easily be obtained with warrants. This also showed how, as Milgram put it, “social media has become the superhighway of drugs.”
“What we see day in and day out across the United States,” she said, “is that these pills — the fentanyl that’s killing Americans — are being sold on Snapchat, on TikTok, Facebook marketplace, Instagram, openly.
… These individuals were using Instagram for almost every part of their business. They were using it to pick the blue color of the [pills] that they were buying from the wholesalers to sell on the streets. They were using it to coordinate shipments from L.A. to D.C. They were using it to arrange payments. So basically every part of the business is being facilitated by Instagram, in this case that ultimately resulted in Diamond’s death,” Milgram noted.
Diamond Lynch’s mom, Paula Lynch, was aware her daughter had a drug problem. She had overdosed once before, only to be saved by two doses of Narcan, which can counteract the effects of opiates. But Paula told NBC News she had no idea just how much risk her daughter was taking by purchasing what she thought were prescription opioid pills from a street dealer.
“We didn’t know,” she said. “I thought it was more of a recreational thing. … We never heard the word ‘fentanyl’ until she was deceased.”
“What I would say to young people is definitely one pill can kill,” she said. “It’s chemical warfare on American citizens, period.”
Paula, who is now raising her grandson, says she will live with regret forever that she couldn’t help her daughter.
