A woman traveling from Los Angeles to New York City was reportedly caught with five pounds of fentanyl in a suitcase.
Authorities in Kansas City arrested a woman at a bus station who was traveling across the country, from Los Angeles to New York, carrying five pounds of fentanyl—reportedly enough of the drug to cause 1.5 million lethal overdoses.
Kansas City Police noticed 33-year-old Evelyn C. Sanchez was “intently watching” detectives as they searched through the luggage on the bus.
When asked, Sanchez told authorities she was heading to New York for “maybe a week,” but the story fell apart when officers reportedly noticed she had not packed a lot of clothing in her luggage.
Following her questioning, K-9 units sniffed inside the bus and indicated a suitcase near Sanchez’s seat on the bus. When the other bus passengers did not claim the suitcase as theirs, police asked Sanchez and she admitted it was hers before allowing officers to search it.
Authorities noted that she seemed “very nervous.”
When asked, Sanchez told police she had “drugs,” according to court records. She did not seem to know what exactly she had, “but it’s a lot.”
Officers checked inside and did indeed find a lot of drugs—over five pounds of fentanyl, “capable of killing thousands of people,” according to Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith.
Local authorities cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the investigation. The DEA estimates the amount of fentanyl could kill several orders of magnitude more people than Smith’s estimates, claiming the operation took “1.5 million lethal doses from the streets.”
There’s no telling where the fentanyl was ultimately heading yet, but it was almost guaranteed to help drive up the number of overdose deaths in the United States and further exacerbate the impact of the opioid crisis.
Of 72,000 overdose deaths in 2017, 50,000 of those were opioid-related—30,000 of which were from fentanyl or related synthetic opioids.
The drug is even getting to people who don’t want them—of 907 samples of drugs sold as heroin in Vancouver, Canada, 822 contained fentanyl.
The U.S. Attorney’s office says Sanchez is in federal custody and awaiting a court date to be scheduled.
