Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Poisonous Intent, The Eric Richens Case

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the mysterious death of Eric Richens, with links to a Moscow Mule cocktail and his wife, Kouri Richens. They delve into Kouri's persona, from her self-published grief book to her alleged actions leading to Eric's death, they shine a spotlight on the clandestine world of poisoners, the intricacies of CPR in a death investigation context, and the world of toxicology and post-mortem drug panels. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-codes:  00:20 - Introduction. 01:15 - Case of Eric Richens. 02:25 - Media attention dynamics in relation to high-profile cases. 03:00 - Intro and analysis of Kouri Richens' self-published grief book. 06:35 - Hypothesis on Kouri's grieving widow persona as a potential smokescreen. 07:35 - The nature of poisoners and speculation about Eric Richens' possible poisoning. 10:00 - In-depth profiling of the victim, Eric, and his wife, Kouri, along with a discussion on their financial dynamics. 14:15 - Theories around Kouri's possible poisoning attempts. 15:25 - Kouri's alleged financial theft from Eric and potential motivations. 17:20 - Toxicology and anaphylaxis. 20:45 - Role of medical examiners in unexplained deaths and the process of performing CPR. 23:40 - Examination of crime scene narratives vs. physical evidence. 27:40 - The autopsy process and specifics around gastric samples. 32:35 - Detection of substances like fentanyl in forensic pathology. 34:10 - Eric Richens' death announcement as a homicide due to fentanyl overdose. 34:25 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When I was a kid, my grandmother had these tumblers I loved to drink out of. They've made them now in the present day so that they're very similar to the way they were back in the 50s and 60s. And they're aluminum. And you can actually see the condensation kind of dripping off the sides. And for me, that always indicated a cool, refreshing drink. There's an alcoholic beverage out there that uses a similar mug, but it's made out of copper.

And it's equally as refreshing. But with, of course, the added alcohol that comes along with it. Here's the recipe. Two ounces vodka. Six ounces ginger beer. A half ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice. And this is to be placed into a copper mug with ice and stirred. It's called a Moscow Mule, but you know, looking through this recipe, I don't see an

indication that fentanyl is required to make this drink. Today, we're going to discuss the apparent homicide of Eric Richens, and it involves a drink, the Moscow Mule. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Back with me, my friend, Dave Mack. He's a senior crime reporter with Crime Online. Dave, we've been following this case now for weeks, and it just, what was it that Alice said? It just keeps getting curiouser as we go along.

It's a tragedy. I don't mean to laugh, but my gosh, did you see this coming? I really didn't. No, I didn't. And I'm sure a lot of other people will soon agree. When Eric Richens died, Corey Richens actually wrote a book to help her children deal with grief. And in promoting this book, by the way, self-published, meaning there wasn't a big book company that actually signed her up to do this. She wrote it down and she paid to have it put out there.

And so that got her on local TV. So when the news media is covering this story, what do we have? We've got the grieving widow talking about helping her children and how they wrote this book, and here's the book. So it's that footage of being able to add to the story that gets more attention. Or the fact that it's just a crazy story about rich people killing one another, you know? Well, yeah, that. And then you take, I'm kind of interested in, Dave, in this dynamic, considering that this has been, this being this book, has been introduced into the storyline. Yes, she did self-publish. Obviously, in the area in which she lived, it, you know, it had some traction because she was on local news. And I'm sure that, what's the word the media always uses?

Brave. She's being brave. She's on television. She's there in the face of this tragedy that has confronted her and her children, which are left behind. And I can tell you the through line kind of went something like this, I would imagine. Well, I saw in my children a great need to be helped through this time period and grief. And I just knew that I didn't want others to suffer as my family has suffered. Now, I thought that this would be a way to help. That's kind of the way these things kind of play out. I really wonder, though, and this is very twisted, I guess, in its own way.

How many people were truly grieving out there, had lost a spouse and they had kids and they latched onto this. Now, just follow this just a bit here. I won't go too far with it. And they began to follow this. They read the book and they thought, God, this would really be good for my kids. I'm having a hard, hard time, man. And it's almost as like this miracle has happened.

I have a tool now at my disposal. And they've read this thing. They've disseminated the information to the kids. Maybe they've read it with the kids in their current situation. And now they look back and they see what she's accused of. And it really gives you pause, doesn't it? Yes, because Corey Richens is now accused of murdering her husband through poisoning. We'll get more into detail on that in just a bit. But I'm thinking about the people who actually did hold on to this. And not just talking about children and losing a parent, we're talking about

anybody dealing with any grief and sharing that grief with loved ones and trying to get through it and holding onto this and really being able to look at her and go, wow, I can get through this. She did. She's on TV talking about it. I can get through it too. And that's the shocking depth of depravity we find ourselves today. Yeah. And again, there's that word, and it seems to be a theme that runs through a lot of these cases, depravity. You think about the depths to which people can sink in the face of these things. And from an investigative standpoint, you begin to wonder, is this part and parcel of an attempt to throw investigators off, to truly buy into the character of the grieving widow. I can tell you this, a lot more is going to come out about this case.

She's been charged. She's in custody. And we're going to hear a lot about motivation in the end game, which, of course, in this particular case, led to the death of her husband. The thing about poisoners, they are so very stealthy. I appeared on a television show, several episodes, a thing that was produced down in Australia called Poisonous Liaisons. It was one of the most satisfying things I'd done. And all of the deaths that we covered on that program had to do with poisoners. And they've been around.

They're as old as time. But they vary so much differently than what you think of a person that goes out and commits some kind of just brutal homicide with their bare hands or a weapon. requires a level of intimacy that you don't see in other cases because you can have intimacy when it comes to stabbing someone to death or certainly bludgeoning someone. But how is it that you can kind of insert yourself into their world, the victim that is, get close enough to them so that you can have them ingest a substance that you know good and well could in fact lead to their death. And that may be what has happened here in the death of Eric Richens. When you read off the ingredients, the way the Moscow Mule is served, had you ever heard

of that drink, Joe? Yeah, yeah. They've been popular for a while. And I really wonder if that's the reason it was chosen, perhaps. The thing that it does contain is ginger, and ginger for years and years actually has a medicinal impact. That's legitimate. You can take ground ginger and it soothes nausea, these sorts of things. I remember when I was little, and I know there's a lot of people in our generation that can identify with this. One of the things my grandma would give me was ginger ale and sherbet. My thought is that vodka has a taste to it, but it's not as pronounced as, say, like tequila or something like that. It's a bit more subtle. It's not even as pronounced as gin and certainly not as whiskey. And then you can mask certain tastes with it. So if you're going to put some type of element, introduce some element into this recipe, I think that this is a perfect selection, not to mention you're masking it with lime as well.

Let's get into this family. You want to for just a minute? Yeah, I'd love to. We're dealing with Eric and Corey Richens. Eric Richens was from a very well-established family. There could be a book just written on his family and the name. And this was actually such a good man. You see people all the time that you know from work, school, church, whatever. And you find those people that are just really good. And you kind of think, is he like this for real? Or is this made up?

Eric Richens was that guy. Loved his kids. Had a great business. He had all the trappings, you know, of coming from a wealthy family. Just a good guy. To give you a little tip, Eric was an outdoorsy guy. And he was kind of known in the family as the guy that everybody's waiting on you to have a big family dinner. And Eric's running behind because he decided to take his four-wheeler out for a few minutes before they left. And he wrecked it. But he's on his way. He just got a dirty shirt on. That was Eric. You know, this was a guy that had three boys that were involved in all kinds of sports, right?

And he either coached or was the assistant coach on all of their teams. On top of that, Guy had a bang in business, which actually does come into play in this story. When we get right down to it, Corey and Eric had been married for nine years, three boys. Corey was in real estate and he had a real estate license and flipped houses. That depended on some of Eric's money and ability to create money to get loans and things like that. It came down to this one huge property that depending on which article you're reading, it was either a $2 million property or a $3.75 million property that Corey wanted to buy and flip. It was unfinished. And just FYI, the home that was the final straw on the camel's back in the Richens' couplehood actually has been known as the money pit in that area. And some people have

referred to it as a cursed property. I'm not saying it caused Eric to die, but it was part of the reasons that Corey was really trying to get him out of the picture. There are many times where there's the proverbial straw that you know, that goes without saying. And I'm looking at an image of it right now, and it's massive. And, of course, it's almost like when you go out to Utah, everywhere you look, you get another postcard shot. Even though this thing is unfinished, it's massive. It's certainly not my taste and certainly not within the realms of what I could do financially. But you look at it and it's framed with mountains all the way around it.

It looks like it would be a lovely, lovely place. But when we're investigating deaths, there's any number of motivations, as we know and as we've talked about in the past, relative to homicides. Certainly financial, it goes without saying, is generally in the top three. And you can connect all kinds of stuff to that, either financial distress, maybe it's connected to finances as they apply to drugs, a need for money, an acquisition of money. It can also part and parcel of anger that's generated as a result of money that's owed to individuals or the position that debt is going to put somebody in. But is this catastrophic enough? Is this situa- because, you know, there's a lot of people out there that have pulled themselves out of the ditch,

proverbially, certainly in real estate, that have made horrible decisions over the years. I don't know that it rises to the level where you think, well, the only answer I have here is, am I going to take the ultimate step and murder my spouse over it? So, that leads me to the question is, is this the first time out of the gate that she has attempted to do this? Because as has been alleged by the authorities, when you're thinking about how much of a dosage to apply to an individual, this requires considerable amount of thought. If you approach it as if it's a scientific endeavor, there have been cases over the years where people have applied graduated amounts of a substance to some medium like a drink or food or something like that and say they ate that,

they got a little bit sick, and it didn't really have the impact that I thought that it was going to have. Let's go ahead and kick it up a notch. And this does, it requires a certain level of nerve, if you will, in order to get close enough to somebody to do this. When you look at their relationship and you have the picture being painted, Eric Richens is the dream father. There was a lot going on negatively with regard to Corey Richens and what she was doing. Reportedly, she was stealing from her husband financially, and he didn't just find out about it a week before he died.

The actual thieving she is accused of began about two and a half years into the marriage. They got married in 2013. By 2016, she was already stealing money. And we're not talking a little bit here. Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of dollars Joe Scott Morgan. Eric found out in 2020. That's when we know he actually found out that Corey had taken out at least $100,000 from his accounts. You know, we mentioned the business accounts. You know, he had access to a lot of cash. She borrowed large amounts of money on his credit cards, over $30,000 there. She actually borrowed $250,000 using a fraudulent power of attorney, forging

his initials on documents, allowing her to act on his behalf. And he found out about it. This is, again, a couple of years ago. So already Eric knew what his wife was all about. He was making plans to get himself out of this. His biggest issue with the boys wasn't money, but he was making plans. And that's why when we look at the last few months of their life together, Corey realized she's losing the cash cow. If she can get rid of him and keep the money, her life keeps cruising ahead. Where when you mentioned more than one time, as far as we know, she hadn't killed anybody up to this point. So I imagine figuring out what do I use to kill him? She probably had to do some research there.

And she happened to have a friend, I put that in air quotes, don't know how close they were, but somebody she had known for a while who was actually kind of a drug dealer. And so I'm sure they had a few discussions about, hey, what kind of drugs could I use for XZ? And that's where this all began. So I'm wondering, at what level do you find out how much a person has used to poison somebody? Can you go back and find out, did she try to use other chemicals to kill Eric in the months leading up to his actual death? Is there a way to figure that out? No, not most of the time where you can go back and check. What you're looking for is to see if drugs have been metabolized in the system. And that means kind of gone through the cycle where it passes through initially from initial ingestion or initial injection, however it is applied, and it passes out of the system.

Drugs do have a life. They have a half-life within the system. But, you know, I found out something else interesting about this case. Apparently, at some point in time, it has been alleged that Eric really believed that she may be trying to kill him. There was one instance where he had eaten a sandwich, I think, that had been given to him. And he began to have what he thought was an allergic reaction. As a matter of fact, it had gotten so bad that he had to use one of his kids' EpiPen injectors to get over the hump with this. I don't know that really how deeply at that time this was dug into.

He had apparently mentioned it to some of his peripheries in his life that he thought that maybe she was trying to kill him. But at that point in time, I guess he was thinking that maybe it was an anaphylaxis event, which you can have a seizure. I'll have to tell you about a case I worked many years ago where the lady committed suicide via anaphylaxis. I'd never worked anything like that, and it's a horrible way to die. But at least his perception at the time was that he started out, I believe, in that particular case where he took a small dose of benadryl, which can help in milder cases, but he felt the need or compelled to grab hold of his child's EpiPen and inject it into his leg, which is an intramuscular injection where you go right down

into the muscle of the leg, generally the meaty part, and slam this thing home. And it's very powerful. And this attack that he was having subsided at that moment, Tom. So, is this indicative of a history? Perhaps that there's something going on. But there's really no way from that perspective where you could go back and see, in fact, if whatever substance that was that had been applied to him was present at autopsy. It's not within the norm for 39-year-old active males with no previous medical history to suddenly die. It doesn't work that way. You have an individual that suddenly dies that fits that parameter. It will draw the eye of investigators.

And the first stop along this route is going to be the medical examiner because they'll be tasked with it. And Dave, just so our listeners understand, if I were as an investigator that worked for the medical examiner, they have a state medical examiner in Utah, and I had a young man that died like this, I am not just going to be able to waltz over to his attending physician who might be a guy that he just goes and sees for an annual checkup and say, hey, doc, yeah, one of your patients has just passed away. Will you sign his death certificate?

That doctor is going to look at me as if I have spiders crawling out of my ears and say, have you lost your mind? I'm not signing this. He has no previous medical history at all. I'm not putting my name on that because he's got to conjure up a cause of death for this person. And it may, on the surface, appear to be a natural event because he doesn't have any trauma. Okay? But this requires, on the part of the medical examiner, to do a natural event because he doesn't have any trauma, okay? But this requires on the part of the medical examiner to do a deep dive to try to understand what in fact happened. What was it, this bolt of thunder that brought down death upon this man at such a young age?

When the police are called to an event like this, 39-year-old guy dead in the middle of the night and in a seemingly comforting area, he's at home in bed and being with his wife and kids the whole night. of people who are no longer with us. If you notice the man that is dead doesn't appear to have been like there was no life-saving measure, no CPR, but the spouse says, yeah, I did CPR, but nothing is there. Can you figure that out when you're looking at the body? Can you tell if somebody has actually tried to do life-saving measures on the individual? Well, that's a tough thing. First off, if you've been trained, for instance, in basic life-saving, if folks go to the Red Cross, for instance, and they get their CPR certification, you know, one of the things that they want you to do, if at all possible, is to get the subject onto, if they're in cardiac arrest, get them onto a hard surface. And the purpose of that is so that you can be above them and you can do an overall examination very quickly.

You're looking for things and you have to be able to get the airway open, which is generally facilitated more easily on that kind of surface. If you're not a medical professional where you can kind of arch the neck back, observe the airway, the old thing about sweeping the air airway see if the airway is occluded blocked by anything and then to do chest compressions you need a firm surface you're interlocking your hands you're placing them adjacent to the sternum and you're doing these these counts of compressions and then breaths that you have to do so one of the things that we'll look for is oh you said that you try to save him well why didn't you pull them over onto the floor? I mean, she could easily say, well, he's a lot bigger than me. I was just frantic. I was just trying to save him. But that's one of the first indicators. Have they taken any steps to see, you know, if there's any kind of trauma? And of course,

if EMTs roll out there, it's going to be pretty obvious. They leave debris everywhere because they're cracking open. And I'm not saying that. I'm not in an accusatory way. People have to understand, you know, they have to crack open their supplies there and they just drop them because they're in the midst of trying to save somebody's life. And you'll have disposable ambu bags, which are the little breathing bags that they use. And you'll have EKG leads that are stuck on various locations anatomically on the body. And sometimes in the field, you can see paddle marks on the chest where they've tried to jolt the individual back into rhythm.

As an investigator, you want to try to understand, is there anything that stands out here? Is there anything at the scene that is going to give me pause to think this is something as there was an old forensic pathologist that used to tell me in the morgue. He says, I want to know if there was anything to indicate that this death is something other than as advertised is what he would say. And so that became kind of a key feature in my mind as I'm looking at this. Is there anything here to indicate that this is something other than as advertised by the family? Because the family, who in this case is going to be the person that discovers them, is going to be the person that's setting the tone

for the narrative. And that's what got my attention. According to court documents, Richens and his wife, Corey, were celebrating a business accomplishment the night he died. Corey reportedly made Eric a Moscow mule and brought it to him in the bedroom. In the meantime, Corey says she went to help one of their children and didn't return

to bed for several hours. It was then she noticed Eric was cold to the touch and she calls 911 and is supposedly attempting to give Eric CPR. According to the arrest affidavit though, first responders arrived and it seemed as like she really hadn't done anything. There was apparently amount of blood in his mouth that made them realize that she's lying. So immediately it's you've got a dead 39 year old man. There's no bullet wounds. There's no knife wounds.

There's no other indications on his body that anything has been done to him. And yet she claims she performed CPR. There's evidence she didn't. So they're going to have to run a drug panel. I'm guessing they're going to have to figure out a toxicology. So when they do that, Joe, and this is just because I don't know, what are they testing for? I mean, are you just testing for cocaine, pills?

I mean, I don't know what the test includes, but I'm guessing in this day and age, there would be a pretty long list of drugs and things to test for in a person these days. Yeah, there are. And let me give you, I'm so glad you mentioned this about the evidence of blood in the mouth. And you make a valid point here regarding the presence of it and an absence of it, say, for instance, on her. Because if you're doing mouth-to-mouth, there'll be that transfer of substances out of the mouth. I've interviewed people that have had vomitus on their face as a result of doing CPR.

And I know that's really disgusting, but this is body bags. That's what we talk about. And that's evidence. It's evidence of something that has occurred. But when you begin to think about blood in the mouth, I'd be very curious to know what his pallor was like. The pallor is a term that people use regarding the coloration of the body. And we have mentioned this before. Remember, I've talked about how people that are in congestive failure have almost an eggplant color to them where they'll be purple.

And that goes to congestion. And what we look for is the level of congestion from what they refer to as from the nipple line to the top of the head. Well, if that's going on and we suspect that it is some kind of congestive failure that's going on and we know he doesn't have, say, heart disease or something like that, then things come to mind. We begin to think, was this a six-year-old death or was this a drug death? And because many drugs that are out there, you mentioned a panel that's run, and this is referred to as a post-mortem panel. Was there anything on board?

And let me tell you the three sources primarily that we draw from from the body at autopsy. First off, we draw blood. Most of the time, that's going to come from the aorta, which is the large vessel that runs off of the heart, okay? And sometimes we'll have to go for peripheral blood, particularly if you've got a real massive trauma case. You might have to even have had to go into the femoral artery in the leg in order to draw blood because there's been such copious blood loss. Then we're going to go and grab urine. People say, how do you do that?

Well, after you have the body open, you can actually go into what's referred to as the roof of the bladder and draw directly out of the bladder. So you can get a rather robust sample of urine, which is pretty good. A great source to look for a variety of different types of drugs. And then we go, and this often dissettles people, we go into the eye and we draw what's referred to as vitreous fluid, which is a viscous kind of fluid that provides form to the eyes. The reason our eyes are not flat, they're filled with this viscous fluid. It holds on to things for a protracted period of time. You can't necessarily quantify the level of drugs that are there, but you can kind of qualify it. It's kind

of like reading the rings on a tree. That's the way I've always compared it. In my simple mind, it helps me remember that. Every now and then, we'll draw bile from gallbladder. If the gallbladder still exists, many people have had colosectomies and gallbladder's no longer there. But here's the one thing that is really curious about this case, Dave. The authorities have, in fact, released the fact that they think whatever this agent was, and they suspect right now that it was fentanyl because it was found in the system, that it was ingested. This is not something he smoked. It's not something he was injected with.

Would you like me to tell you how they make that determination? How would you possibly know the difference? This is, it's not, again, I talk about forensic pathology is, can be layered and complicated and all that stuff, but it's really, it's really common sense. We take gastric samples. So, when we're doing our dissection of the body in the morgue what happens is is that when the stomach is examined first off you don't examine it inside the body cavity you tie it off superior like at the base of the esophagus where it kind of dumps into the top part of the stomach you tie it off. You clip it above the tie off.

Then you go inferior or below the stomach where it dumps into the small bowel. And there's a loop of bowel that comes off there. Well, you go through there and you tie that off. All the other connective tissue that is going to hold the stomach in place is going to be trimmed away and the stomach comes out like a big sack, essentially. And this is very important because once you get the stomach outside of the body cavity, because if you open it up in the body cavity, it'll co-mingle with any kind of residual blood that's come about from the autopsy and this sort of thing. Place the stomach onto the dissecting board and you get a big container,

right? You hold one end of the stomach and let gravity do the work. You clip one of the ends that has been tied off and the contents of the stomach literally pour into these containers. I've seen it done a variety of ways. I've seen people actually dip the contents out, but this is the most effective way because you're going to get everything. One of the things that you first do is you visualize. It's just the same with any other kind of examination. You'll visualize. You're looking for what has been ingested, and some foodstuffs are very easy to appreciate, particularly things that are green and leafy. You can pick up on that pretty quickly. You can actually smell, when you open the stomach

The smell of alcohol for some reason Becomes highly concentrated When you open the stomach If anybody's even had one glass of wine It'll knock you back It's not like someone Have you ever Like the morning after

You've been around somebody That has been drinking the night before And they kind of breathe on you You can get that odor of alcohol And I know that there's a lot of jokes made about that. Imagine that smell that you smell coming off a living person and multiply that by a factor of two, and it'll knock you to your knees many times. So, you're trying to get all of the contents. And so, you're going to visualize these contents. You'll see autopsy reports that will talk about aromas.

Most famously, it's going to be alcohol. You know, there's a distinct odor of alcohol, forensic pathologists will say. But to the visual aspect, you're looking to see if there are any particulate remnant of drugs that are remaining. White powdery little dots, for instance, dependent upon the type of drug it is, that it hasn't been fully digested in the system yet. Now, if that fails, you take a sample of that gastric content. Remember, I talked about how we dumped it into a container. Well, you take a separate tube and you pour that content into the tube. And dude, that goes to the state crime lab. And they will run all of the panels that are standard. Now, in the world in which we indwell nowadays, there is a pestilence upon our country. And it's fentanyl.

It's so pervasive. It's used as an additive for drugs now. People will lace things with fentanyl. It's so pervasive. It's used as an additive for drugs now. People will lace things with fentanyl. People have used fentanyl, which is a narcotic for a long time. It's been on the schedule of drugs that have been used by physicians for pain relief and all these sorts of things. It's out there, but it's so insidious, Dave, that this now is part of a standard forensic drug panel. If you're looking to be stealthy in a poisoning, fentanyl is not the way you want to go. It's not an exotic. It's not something like, we've got to send this drug test off to Germany to see if they can find something there that we might not be thinking of.

No, no, no. This is, they're going to get a hit on this. And once they determine that it's there, that's when, you know, you'd ask me early on, that's when you're going to now, once you've, and I keep saying this, once you've qualified it, that means that it is there, then you're going to quantify it. And in the case of Eric Richens, police have decided something here. They've decided not only is Eric Richens' death a homicide, but it is a homicide via fentanyl. So how much fentanyl would Eric Richens have ingested?

How much would it take to kill a person? And what does fentanyl do to the body, Joe? Amazingly, fentanyl is one of these drugs that when it is, it's essentially micro-dosed from the perspective of how much is administered, even from a therapeutic, you know, fentanyl traditionally has been a therapeutic drug, right? It's something that's used in medical practice. It's a precursor many times for anesthesia. And here's the thing.

Most of the time when you take a drug, it's measured in milligrams, right, Dave? So, if it's measured in milligrams, think about this. Fentanyl is administered in micrograms, okay? is equivalent to 0.0001 milligrams of another drug. And when you get up into the level of, say, for instance, now we're talking micrograms, not milligrams. When you start to get up into like 150 micrograms, you're starting to get up into that lethal level. It doesn't take much. As a matter of fact, there's a couple of great images that are online. People can appreciate this. It is granular, a granular presentation of fentanyl adjacent to a penny. And when you see this comparison between

the two, the penny, and everyone knows what a penny looks like, the penny looks gigantic. And just that small dose is being demonstrated there in a physical sense, because it's really hard to wrap your brain around these numbers. It looks so tiny, but it is so very, very lethal. You have to think about what the mechanism is that occurs when fentanyl is ingested. You know, what's its purpose? Well, the purpose with fentanyl being a precursor, for instance, for something like anesthesia, something that's going to put you into that kind of dreamlike state, you know, it's going to press you down and down and down. Well, if you give a person too much of this stuff, it automatically goes to work, obviously, on the brain, neurological centers.

But more specifically, it really compromises, depending upon how much you have on board, it really compromises your ability to breathe. It will send, and how many times have we talked about this on body bags with a lot of other drugs, particularly heroin? It will send the individual into respiratory distress. And can you imagine you're in this kind of dreamlike state and there's no way to kind of climb up out of it, but maybe just maybe you're sensing your inability to breathe. It's like

being held beneath water and you can't breathe. You can't come up out of it and your body's reacting. You start to convulse perhaps. Your brain is screaming for oxygen, but you can't uptake it at all. And so this is going to lead to respiratory failure. In many of these cases, you'll see that presentation that we see with heroin many times where the people will turn that kind of eggplant shade of purple. They'll have the frothy edematous cone that's coming out of their mouth. And you just know that it's a horrible languishing way to die. It's, and it can,

this is, this is the really kind of, you know, scary thing about it is that it can be done so very stealthily. And, you know, in, in this case in particular, what the police are indicating is that this Moscow mule had been laced with this stuff. And we don't really have a firm figure on the levels that are involved.

I think that we probably will eventually. But the sad thing is, is that there are thousands and thousands of these cases, not exactly like this, but there are thousands and thousands of these cases all across the country where you have people that are manufacturing these drugs that are including fentanyl within the drug itself that they're selling, whether it's cocaine or heroin or whatever. And the thing about it is it's like putting snake venom in everything that's being sold. This is an iHeart Podcast.