16-Year-Old Girl's Fentanyl Death Leads To Canyon Lake Arrest

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CA — Another suspect has been arrested in connection with the fentanyl death last week of a 16-year-old French Valley girl.

Jeremiah David Carlton, 18, was taken into custody at 12:13 a.m. Saturday in Canyon Lake, jail records show.

He is being held at Southwest Detention Center on suspicion of murder and is scheduled in court Wednesday with no bail set for him.

Raymond Tyrrell, 18, of French Valley was also arrested on suspicion of murder in the case. He was taken into custody Thursday and booked into Banning's Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility.

A murder charge against Tyrrell was filed Monday by the Riverside County District Attorney's Office. He is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday. A filing against Carlton was pending, although jail records show he is due in court Wednesday.

Both men have been linked to an incident Wednesday at a home in the 35000 block of Sugar Maple Street in French Valley, the sheriff's department reported.

According to sheriff's Sgt. Rick Espinoza, a man and a 16-year-old girl were found unresponsive at the home around 7:04 p.m. and fentanyl poisoning was suspected.

The pair were rushed to the hospital, but the girl did not survive.

It is unclear if Tyrrell or Carlton was the fentanyl survivor.

Their arrests come in the same week that the Riverside County Sheriff's Department announced a previous homicide arrest linked to a fentanyl death.

During a Feb. 22 press briefing that announced the county's first-ever murder charge against an alleged drug dealer who sold pills containing fentanyl that ended in a person's death, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said prosecuting an overdose or drug-poisoning death as murder is not easy. Prosecutors must prove the accused is not only guilty of selling fentanyl but that he/she also had "specific knowledge" of the synthetic opioid's dangers.

In the case announced Monday, prosecutors will try it under the "Watson murder rule," similar to legal precedence used when filing a second-degree murder charge against an intoxicated driver who ends up killing someone in a crash. The rule argues that intoxicated drivers have "implied malice" — they know ahead of time that their actions can have deadly consequences.

Most people who take pills containing fentanyl have no idea the dangerous synthetic opioid is in the drug they're taking. Fentanyl is very inexpensive to manufacture. The powder form is typically mixed into substances like powdered baby formula or other cost-effective products, then made/pressed into counterfeit pills. The fake pills are then fraudulently sold on the black market, often via social media, as oxycodone, Percocet or any number of other drugs. Fentanyl is also making its way into other street drugs like methamphetamine, according to Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

The sheriff announced his intention to crack down on fentanyl sellers/providers.

"We are making it a goal [that] every death caused by fentanyl toxicity is being investigated as a potential homicide," he said during Monday's briefing.

It's unknown whether anyone who supplied drug(s) to the French Valley girl had any knowledge they were passing on the synthetic opioid.

RELATED: 'Our Kids Were Poisoned To Death': SoCal's Fentanyl Conversation