UPDATE | 15,000 fentanyl pills, 2 pounds of meth found stashed in woman’s Tri-Cities bedroom
A Richland woman is in jail on investigation of having 15,000 potentially deadly fentanyl pills.
Detectives initially said they discovered 7,000 pills in a Kennewick home on 31st Avenue, but Deputy Prosecutor Julie Long said they updated that number to 15,000 pills and two pounds of methamphetamine.
Amy Lynn Loza pleaded innocent this week in Benton County Superior Court to delivering controlled substances.
A part of the process, Long asked to double Loza’s bail to $40,000.
She said a significant portion of the fentanyl doses were the multi-colored pills that look like candy.
She also noted that Loza had been released from jail after being charged earlier this year with delivering fentanyl.
Loza’s defense attorney asked to wait to address the bail amount. In the meantime, Judge Sam Swanberg agreed to the raise her bail.
Search warrant
The Tri-City Metro Drug Task Force received a tip Oct. 20 that Loza had a large amount of fentanyl, according to an affidavit of probable cause from police.
Police got a warrant to search her Richland home on Hood Avenue.
While it’s unclear what officers found at that house, they talked with Loza and she reportedly admitted to recently buying 12,000 fentanyl pills, according to court documents.
She said she buys the pills in large quantities and then divides them up to into smaller amounts, said court documents.
She allegedly said there were about 8,000 pills stashed in her bedroom on the 1800 block of West 31st Avenue in Kennewick.
According to Benton County Assessor online records, Loza owns the home in Richland, but not the one in Kennewick.
Police applied for a second search warrant for the Kennewick house and found seven different packages with about 1,000 pills each, according the investigators.
It’s believed all of them are fentanyl.
Highly potent drug
The drug is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rates of overdose deaths from the drug have been on the rise in recent years.
And fentanyl has surpassed methamphetamine for accidental overdose deaths in Benton County.
This was the second time in a year that Loza was allegedly caught with a sizable amount of drugs. She was also charged in February with distributing a controlled substance.
The Metro Drug Task Force used a informant to set up a controlled purchase of fentanyl from Loza.
Court documents don’t say how much of the drug was purchased at that time.
The details on the status of that case were not immediately available.
The Metro Drug Task Force includes detectives from Kennewick, Pasco, Richland and West Richland police departments and the Benton and Franklin sheriff’s offices.
The task force investigates mid-level criminal organizations linked to narcotics and weapon trafficking.
The most recent information available is from 2020 when the task force found 93,000 fentanyl pills, which was up from about 13,000 the year before.
This story was originally published October 25, 2022 at 12:59 PM.