A 23 year-old alleged fentanyl peddler was arrested on Thursday and charged with selling fentanyl-laced pills to teenagers in downtown Los Gatos, including at a parking lot and church near Los Gatos High.
“This is not a war on drugs, this is a struggle to save lives,” Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement.
Deputy District Attorney Eunice Lee said that the Santa Clara Police Department launched an investigation into Simon Armendariz of San Jose after a 15-year-old girl overdosed on a Percocet pill laced with fentanyl while using the restroom during an evening Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
Though the girl survived, she became unconscious, pale, and cold to the touch by the time paramedics arrived and administered the opioid-blocking drug Narcan, Lee said.
The girl was among one of four teens who bought fentanyl from Armendariz, Lee said.
“He urged his teenaged buyers to share his contact information to build up his customer list,” prosecutors said in a news release.
The teenagers knew that his pill supply was strong, and dangerous, Lee said. They carried the opioid-blocker Narcan in case they overdosed, like the 15-year-old-girl.
Back in 2020, Los Gatos became the epicenter in Santa Clara County for the fentanyl youth crisis when two teenagers fatally overdosed.
Spokesperson Tanya De La Cruz of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District says that fentanyl is not unique to the Los Gatos high school. The powerful opioid, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin, just “seems to be widespread” in Santa Clara County and the entire Bay Area region, she said. Since the two deaths in 2020, Los Gatos High has trained all its staff on how to use Narcan and identify the signs of a fentanyl overdose.
A Bay Area News Group survey published Sunday of more than 40 school districts in the region found that 60% of responding districts have not yet trained their staffs on how to recognize signs of fentanyl poisoning and do not have access to Narcan. A report in October found that fentanyl is now responsible for a staggering one in five California youth deaths aged 15 to 24 statewide.
Simon Armendariz, who also goes by the nicknames “Madman,” and “Risky,” is charged with felony drug sales to minors, which can carry a possible prison sentence. He was arraigned Thursday afternoon in Santa Clara County. At the hearing, Lee convinced the presiding judge that Armendariz was too big of a risk to the community to be let out on bail.
“Just the sheer number of victims and their ages raises concern,” Lee said. “[Just] think with the holidays and the population of minors that he was targeting and just the sheer dangerousness of fentanyl — this is really serious.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com