SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — It’s being called the largest fentanyl bust in state history. Enough suspected fentanyl to kill 2.5 million people is now off the streets of metro Atlanta.
Maj. Forrest Bohannon with the Sandy Springs Police Department said an anonymous tip from another department led Sandy Springs police to an apartment where they found a contraption for packing powder into bricks and then to a car and a stunning discovery.
“We seized 5 kilograms of powdered fentanyl,” DEA Special Agent in Charge Jae Chung said.
They also called in the help of the DEA.
Chung told Channel 2 investigative reporter Mark Winne that is enough fentanyl to kill 2.5 million people.
“It was shocking when we found that amount of fentanyl in our city. You can compare it to killing our entire population of the city of Sandy Springs,” Bohannon said. “We found two weapons in this apartment complex where we found these fentanyl pills. There are children and adults and several innocent people that live in that area. In two suitcases, we found approximately 240,000 pills, which we believe to contain fentanyl.”
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“Someone with this quantity of fentanyl has direct connections to one of three cartels: Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation, or Cjng, or Nuevo La Familia Cartel. And we’re confident that we’ll be able to track this down to one of those cartels,” Chung said.
Chung and Bohannon told Winne that the haul included smaller amounts of cocaine, methamphetamine, and PCP, but most of what investigators found is suspected to be fentanyl, which kills about 70,000 Americans a year.
Chung said the counterfeit pills were made to look like oxycodone, a painkiller that is one of the most abused drugs here and elsewhere.
“Your son, Jack O’Kelly, was captain of his football and lacrosse teams and High School Quarterback Zell Miller Scholar at UGA, and died of a fentanyl overdose from a counterfeit pill?” Winne asked Mike O’Kelley about his son, who died of a fentanyl overdose from a counterfeit pill that looked like Xanax.
“That’s correct. Yes,” Mike O’Kelley said. “(This is) great work by the men and women in law enforcement in the state of Georgia. We could save millions of lives getting these fake pills and fentanyl off the street.”
Chung said metro Atlanta remains the hub of cartel activity for the Southeastern United States, one of the two most significant locales for that in the Eastern U.S., with about half the dope that comes through here headed for someplace else.
But the circumstances in this case led him to believe most of the powdered suspected fentanyl and the pills would’ve been bound for metro Atlanta streets.
“The suspect had a lengthy criminal history to include violent offenses with a firearm, drug trafficking and also, he was wanted in two different states,” Chung said.
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