Fatal fentanyl dose leads to rare homicide charge against Franklin County drug dealer
A 34-year-old man worried a customer’s addiction was going to get out of control.
Jacob Ehrhart sent a series of text messages saying he was trying to keep Sterling Peterson’s fentanyl addiction from turning deadly.
“I was scared to death he was going to get worse if I didn’t basically step in and try to regulate the situation. I promised that I will never supply him again if I find out he’s messing up,” Ehrhart wrote to Peterson’s wife, according to recently-filed court documents.
But prosecutors believe the Mesa, Wash., man made a mistake when he delivered the fatal dose of fentanyl to the 37-year-old father of two.
Franklin County prosecutors are charging Ehrhart under a rarely used controlled substance homicide law in the June 24 death.
Ehrhart also is accused of having meth, ecstasy and fentanyl and the packaging materials and scales to sell them in his Mesa home and truck.
He has pleaded innocent to the homicide and drug distribution charges.
Franklin County deputies began investigating Ehrhart after Peterson died from a fatal fentanyl overdose. He was discovered inside his home northeast of Mesa with strips of foil with black lines burned into them.
The electrician was struggling with a fentanyl addiction, his wife told detectives. He had been trying to go through rehabilitation.
Witnesses said Peterson only bought drugs from Ehrhart, and would spend nights there when he was starting to slip back into addiction. He also had people drive to Ehrhart’s home to pick up fentanyl pills from the mailbox.
Ehrhart also sent text messages to Peterson’s wife saying that he was trying to keep him “from getting super out of control by not getting him very many.”
Controlled substance homicide
While the charge of controlled substance homicide is not filed often in Washington state, this is the second case filed in the Tri-Cities this year.
Benton County prosecutors charged Blake McKinley Sickler, 29, after a Richland woman overdosed on Valentine’s Day 2020.
Both deaths are linked to fentanyl, which has become one of the most deadly illegal drugs in the area.
Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and hundreds of times stronger than street-level heroin, federal officials have said. In recent years, it has surpassed methampthetamine as the illegal drug responsible for the most overdose deaths.
While the drug homicide law has been on the books since 1987, the last time someone was charged in Benton County with the offense before this year was in 2011.
At the time, Brian Burt, a suspected 35-year-old drug dealer, was charged in two overdose deaths. And he faced a third count in Franklin County.
He was accused of being in the same room as two fellow heroin addicts, Shirley E. Sanders, 44, and Derek Scott Bradley, 21, when they died. And he supplied a lethal dose heroin to Liam D. Hermsen, 29.
Police and prosecutors at the time said he was under investigation for three more deaths.
In the end, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
Franklin County Prosecutor Shawn Sant has said it can be a difficult charge to prove.
Not only do prosecutors need to show that the suspect supplied the drugs to the victim, but also they must prove that it was that particular dose that killed the person.
“We must believe that a reasonable jury would find sufficient evidence of each element beyond a reasonable doubt before we would file charges,” Sant said at the time.
Federal prosecutors charged two men in 2018 in the Tri-Cities with selling a lethal dose of fentanyl to a man who was found dead in his apartment after investigators found the pills near his body.
Hector Medina, who was accused of moving significant quantities of drugs through the Tri-Cities, pleaded guilty to the crime and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The man who gave the pills to his friend, Jubentino Soto, was sentenced to five years in a federal prison for conspiracy to distribute fentanyl.
This story was originally published November 14, 2022 at 12:51 PM.