Police Officer Posed As Dead Man To Catch Woman Distributing Drugs

A woman from Tampa, Florida, was arrested and charged with distributing drugs causing the death of an individual. Investigators caught the 28-year-old woman with the help of an undercover officer who posed as the dead customer.

Joamary Rosario was caught after she allegedly sold 10 bags of a substance, a mix of banned drugs, to a man who died on Nov. 6, 2018. According to a statement by the United States Attorney Maria Chapa Lopez, Rosario was arrested and charged with conspiring to distribute a substance containing a mixture of heroin, fentanyl and acetyl fentanyl and distribution of the same substance leading to the death of a man.

On Nov. 6, the man got the substance from Rosario and died soon after injecting it. A medical autopsy was conducted on the body and it revealed the cause of death was an accidental overdose due to the mixture of heroin and fentanyl. The next day, an undercover law enforcement officer posed as the dead man and made contact with Rosario. He asked her to deliver more of the substance she had the night before. After Rosario agreed, they set up a meeting spot.

When she arrived at the spot, she was arrested and officers found three more bags of the same substance in her possession. If Rosario is convicted, she faces a minimum mandatory penalty of 20 years, and up to life, in federal prison.

As per the indictment recently made public, Rosario conspired with some other people to distribute the substance. The number of suspects or their names were not revealed in the indictment paper, neither were the charges against them.

The officers later revealed that the case was a part of the Middle District of Florida’s anti-opioid strategy to fight opioid trafficking and abuse.

In a similar case of police going undercover, earlier this year, in January, police from Reading, Pennsylvania, investigated a closed suspected drug house. The house, in a northern Reading neighborhood, was reopened later with undercover detectives posing as drug dealers. Police arrested more than a dozen walk-up customers along with a resident, who was taken into police custody during a raid of his home. The man, identified as Rene Comas-Ayala confessed that he let drug dealers use his basement for their activities in exchange of 10 packets of heroin a day to support his drug habit. During the primary questioning, he denied that there was any drug in his house since there hadn’t been a delivery since the morning. However, when the police searched the house, they found a box of cocaine, packing materials, injection needles and two strips of Suboxone— a prescription narcotic used to treat opioid addiction. He was arrested and faced charges of possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia.