LI Drug Dealer Gets 16 Years In Prison For Fatal Overdose

CENTRAL ISLIP, NY — An Amityville drug dealer was sentenced to 16 years in prison Tuesday for selling fentanyl to a man who overdosed and died in Copiague in 2019.

Austin "Mailk" Hunter, 43, was also sentenced to five years post-release supervision by Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Timothy Mazzei. Hunter was convicted in November 2020 of a host of drug charges.

“Whenever there is a fatal overdose in Suffolk County, we treat it as a homicide and immediately take investigative steps to identify the drug dealer responsible," Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini said. "With today’s sentence, we are not just ensuring that he is held accountable and is no longer peddling deadly fentanyl in our community, but sending a message to other drug dealers that they will get caught and go to prison."

Prosecutors said Hunter sold drugs to a man who died in April 2019 and toxicology tests showed it was a fentanyl overdose. Police analyzed the man's phone and found evidence he purchased the drugs from Hunter, Sini said. Hunter was arrested in May after agents with the Long Island Heroin Task Force conducted an undercover operation to buy more drugs from him.

Hunter was convicted of two counts of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, two counts of third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and second-degree criminally using drug paraphernalia.

Sini said the case marked the first conviction in Suffolk County history for a criminal sale of a controlled substance based on a toxicology analysis instead of the recovery of narcotics. It was also the first felony trial conviction in Suffolk County since jury trials were reinstated amid the coronavirus pandemic, Sini said.