The Daily - He Tried to Save a Friend. They Charged Him With Murder.

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of rape, sexual abuse and death.As an epidemic of fentanyl use continues in America, causing tens of thousands of deaths each year, lawmakers and law enforcement agencies are holding one group increasingly responsible: drug users themselves.Eli Saslow, a writer for The Times, tells the story of a man whose friendship ended in tragedy and a set of laws that say he is the one to blame.Guest: Eli Saslow, a writer at large for The New York Times.Background reading: Two friends bought $30 worth of fentanyl before making it into rehab. One overdosed. The other was charged in his death.Harsh fentanyl laws ignite a fierce debate. Critics say, the approach could undermine public health goals and advances in addiction treatment.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. As the epidemic of fentanyl use in America continues unabated, causing tens of thousands of deaths per year, lawmakers and law enforcement agencies are holding one group increasingly responsible, drug users themselves. Today, my colleague Eli Saslow on a man whose friendship ended in tragedy and a new set of laws that say he is the one to blame. he is the one to blame. It's Friday, September 22nd. Eli, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, Sabrina. Before we start, I want you to tell me a little bit about what you do. So I've been an admirer of your writing for a very long time, but I'm curious how you would define your beat. Well, first of all, that's so nice. Thank you. I write about the big issues in the country, the big tension points, but I do it through really personal, intimate human stories. I try to think about who are the people sort of in the swirl of the big tensions in our country and how can I find them? How can I find them in a moment of uncertainty? And right now, one of the biggest issues in our country is fentanyl. You know, it's become a massive public health crisis.

One of the biggest that we have, it's killing hundreds of people a day. It's ruining not only addicts' lives, but families' lives and entire communities where this has become the dominant issue. So this is something I've been looking into for a while. And recently, I stumbled into a case in doing this research that really kind of crystallized for me how complicated this issue is, because it's a case that shows the incredibly personal devastation

of this drug, but it also shows how difficult the problem is to solve. And tell me about that case. This is a call from and paid for by an inmate at Oklahoma County Jail. At the center of that case is a guy named Josh Askins. Press 1 to accept all communications from this inmate. I started talking to Josh probably about three months ago. Hey, Josh, it's Eli from the New York Times.

How are you? I'm doing okay. How are you? I'm good, man. We got it to work. We did it. It was challenging to get in touch with him because he was in jail. So first I called his mom, then I called his lawyer, eventually sort of built enough trust with them that they gave my number to Josh and he called me.

And Josh and I started talking really regularly on the phone. And that's how I really began to learn about who Josh was and what had sort of led him to the place where he was then, which was in prison. And what did you learn about Josh? I learned that he'd had, in many ways, I think a pretty typical American childhood. I pretty much grew up in Moore, Oklahoma. I lived there until the end of my eighth grade year. Josh grew up mostly in Oklahoma. There was lots of joy, lots of like playing in Oklahoma with cousins, four-wheelers, you know, video games. But there was also a good bit of sadness. His parents' marriage ended very early in his life. His mom was working a lot. He was raised largely by his grandparents.

And when Josh was a kid, he told me that he was raped by an older neighbor boy who lived across the street. He was raped? Yeah, and it's something he never really talked about. He couldn't find anybody to confide in. So pretty early in his life, he developed these real feelings of loneliness.

So he tried to find different ways to cope. What did that look like? You know, I started smoking pot when I was about 13. And, you know, probably daily after I was 15. It looked like starting to drink and starting to smoke weed. Then Josh, when he was a teenager, he was with another friend and they were in a minor car accident. Josh hurt his knee. He was with another friend, and they were in a minor car accident. Josh hurt his knee. He was prescribed painkillers, opioid painkillers, and he started taking them and realized not only did they take away the knee pain, but they took away a lot of his dissatisfaction, his loneliness. And so when those prescriptions ran out,

Josh realized that his grandmother, who he was often staying with, had her own opioid pain prescriptions, and he started taking some of those. I'll just start thinking, you know, oh, just this one time, I'll have a good time this one time, and that'll be, you know, it, or just this weekend. At one point in time, I was able to control my usage, but at some point along the way, I lost that control. And I think part of me is always thinking that one day I'll get that control back, but it's not there anymore. And there is one moment that Josh tends to point

to when he thinks about how his drug use started to really accelerate, and that's the death of his grandfather. Josh's grandfather was a huge figure in his life. And that's the death of his grandfather. Josh's grandfather was a huge figure in his life. He was maybe the main authority figure and also often Josh's main caretaker. He was sort of his role model. And as Josh's grandfather got sick, Josh was already using some of these pills. The night that he passed away,

my grandmother called me over that night. On the night that Josh's grandfather died, they wanted Josh to come over there, but he wasn't in his right mind. I think I had taken some sleeping pills, and I got him back into bed and told him I'd be back over in the morning. A few hours later, my mom had called

and told me he had passed away. And he wasn't there. He wasn't present for his grandfather in those final moments. I kind of carried that guilt with me for a long while. And I believe that's when my drug usage kind of took it down with spirals at that point. And this started just a brutal decade-long stretch for Josh where he would sink into awful active addiction for long stretches. Then he would have other stretches where he would emerge and he would be clean. he would go through rehab and he'd be back for a year even two years before the addiction started again

and so like a lot of drug addicts josh was using a lot of things heroin was the drug that he used the most but over the last five years heroin particularly black tar heroin which is what josh liked to smoke it started to basically disappear from the drug market in Oklahoma City and honestly everywhere. You know, about two years ago in Oklahoma City, fentanyl took over that entire market. It started coming up in the heroin that I was getting. I could tell that there was a different taste, you know, to the heroin because I never shot up. I've never used intravenously or anything, but I noticed whenever I was smoking, I could tell there's a different taste. taste to the heroin. Because I never shot up. I've never used intravenously or anything. But I noticed whenever I was smoking, I could tell there's a different taste.

For some reason, the fentanyl would make me throw up. So I kind of shied away from it at first. But eventually, you couldn't find any heroin that didn't have fentanyl. And so it kind of progressed from there. And tell me what a fentanyl addiction actually looks like, like from the perspective of someone like Josh who's addicted. It's miserable. I mean, I've spent a lot of time with fentanyl addicts, and I don't think I've ever found one who enjoys being addicted to fentanyl. You become dependent on it really quickly. It's up to 40 times more addictive than heroin.

It's a really fast acting high, but it's an even faster withdrawal experience. So you can use fentanyl and two hours later, already potentially be going into early withdrawal symptoms where your body is starting to feel sick, where you're sweating, you're feeling nauseous, you have brain fog, and that's just getting worse and worse and worse until you use again. So for somebody like Josh and for a lot of people who are addicted to fentanyl on the streets in the United States right now, they are using eight to 10 times a day, buying drugs in very small quantities and then using and then sort of feeling okay for a little while and then trying to come up with money to buy again. And that money is often like minuscule.

You know, in a lot of places in the United States right now, fentanyl sells for as little as 50 cents to a dollar for a blue pill. You can trade a cigarette for a blue pill of fentanyl. So these are constant transactions of desperation that are happening 10 times or more a day for people who are addicted. So your life becomes about finding the drug, and even more than a very addictive drug like heroin, it's every two hours. So, you know, you need to constantly be going out in search of it to not go into withdrawal.

Yeah, you're enslaved to it. That's the reality. I mean, you're both psychologically dependent on the drug, it changes your brain chemistry, and you're physically dependent because otherwise you're going to get sick and brutally sick. I mean, we're talking about, you know, unmedicated fentanyl withdrawal, most doctors equate to basically going through an incredibly difficult labor. So these are like violent, painful physical symptoms. Josh would often talk to me about how his main anxiety would be not wanting to go to sleep unless he knew that he had just enough fentanyl left to smoke in the morning. Because the idea of waking up already in withdrawal and not being able to stave off those symptoms a little bit was too terrifying. He would never be able to sleep unless he knew he had that little amount to wake up to. So what does the rest of Josh's life look like at this point?

Oh, it looks so grim. I went to see where Josh was living at his most recent low point, and he was inside a sleeping bag in the sort of crawl space of an abandoned house in Oklahoma City. There was a rotted-out hole in the porch of this abandoned house, and Josh had found a way to crawl in there and get back kind of under the floorboards so that he would be out of the rain. I'm sure there's probably, you know, worse places to be, I suppose. But yeah, definitely, you know, it wasn't fun. But, you know, I guess part of me was just too proud to ask for any help or to try and get into one of the night centers. I heard they're pretty tough to get into. And it's this torturous place to live, and he's trying to spend as little time there as possible, honestly. So he's often walking around the neighborhood.

And one day in the spring of last year, Josh is walking around and he runs into this guy who lives with his grandmother at a house that happens to be basically right around the corner from the abandoned house where Josh was staying. This guy's name was Chris Drake, and meeting him that day really changed the course of Josh was staying. This guy's name was Chris Drake, and meeting him that day really changed the course of Josh's life. He hollered at me, and I went over to him to kind of introduce himself,

and we just got to talking, and so I went over and hung out at his house. And Josh and Chris would start to talk a little bit. At first, Chris was kind of suspicious of Josh. You know, at first, I think he kind of thought, well, is this guy going to steal some stuff from me just because he's homeless or something? And then he realized that, you know, just because I was homeless at that time doesn't mean that, you know, I'm going to steal your stuff if I get a chance or anything like that.

So he started to come to trust me a little bit, I believe. What both of them really wanted from each other was just company. They were both lonely. And they would sit on the porch and they would have these long conversations about their lives. We talked about, you know, our relationships with our moms growing up.

You know, we both had strong relationships with our grandmothers. We both had a similar faith, even though we weren't practicing it, obviously, at that time. It turned out they had a similar faith, even though we weren't practicing it, obviously, at that time. It turned out they had a lot in common. They both really relied on their faith. They each were reading the Bible for the sixth time, coincidentally.

So they talked a lot about how their faith had sort of informed their life. And they also talked about their own traumas that they'd been through that they thought had led them to a place of addiction. We were able to confide in each other about some things. You know, we had both had, you know, stuff happen to us when we were growing up. You know, we were both molested at a young age, so we were able to bond over that as well, you know, and how we had issues trusting men in our lives sometimes because of that. Just like Josh, Chris had also been molested and sexually abused when he was a kid. And those were conversations that neither of them felt safe having with very many people. But once they realized that they had each endured a similar thing, they both finally found like they had somebody to talk to about that. And it formed this really intimate bond pretty quickly i think we both wanted to find love and acceptance from our peers

and uh we we had had difficulty with that in the past so i think i think we kind of bonded over that like until then josh didn't really have friends he had people that he got high with he had people that were sharing sort of his stage in life and his desperation, but he didn't have people that he was having confessional conversations with. And that was a huge thing for him. We also talked about other things. So we talked about, you know, wanting to get clean and how hard it was. The other thing that Josh and Chris really bonded over was that they both wanted to get clean. And that's, that is not a small thing when you are enslaved to an addiction. It beats you down. It wears you down. And people tend to get hopeless. And Chris and Josh were not hopeless. A lot of what they would do together was figure out how can we get better and to be

the people that we want to be. So they had started making plans to try to get into a rehab facility that would help them get clean and help get their lives back on track. We had talked about going to Oakwood Springs, which I had never been to that detox before. He had been to it before. He said that he needed to call his stepdad and stepdad would help us get in there. So the friendship, it sounds like, was based, at least on part, on this shared trauma, right? And it looked like it was actually starting to make a difference in their lives, like that they might actually find their way out of this addiction. Totally. We know now that a lot of what drives people deeper into addiction is things like loneliness, like disenfranchisement, disassociation. And suddenly,

these two people found each other, both at vulnerable moment and formed a real connection so they'd begun calling around trying to get into these different rehab places they'd finally found one that was going to take them but before they could get in their plans got cut short what happened well i mean that day so So Josh woke up one morning in April of this year under the abandoned porch. And I figured I'd go over and see Chris, you know, so I walked over to his house, see if he was... And did what he often did, which was walk over to Chris's house. And Josh at that point hadn't used fentanyl yet that day. He was starting to ache. His legs were starting to hurt. He was beginning to feel hot, nauseous. He went over to kill time with Chris on the porch. He asked me if I could

get him some fentanyl. And Chris said to Josh, hey, we're not going to be able to get into this rehab place for a few more days. Can we get some fentanyl that might help get us through? He asked me a few times. And finally, I was like, all right, man, you know, let's go. And so the two of them got into Chris's car to go find some fentanyl. So they ended up at this motel where Josh saw somebody that he knew and that he'd bought drugs from before. I gave this person some money and gave it to us. And Josh and Chris combined their money. They had about 25 bucks. They spent all of it. They gave it to him and he gave them back a very small amount of white powder. We had about three-tenths of a gram.

And what's basically a tiny little dime bag. I mean, it looks like a little shake of sugar in a tiny little Ziploc bag. But potentially a very potent shake of sugar. Yeah. And Josh and Chris, they put it on a little bit of tinfoil while they're in the car. They cook up that tinfoil with a lighter. So you light the bottom of the tinfoil. The drugs start to smoke a little bit.

It's usually like a yellow smoke. And with what's essentially a straw, Chris took the first hit and then passes it over to Josh. Josh takes a hit, passes it back to Chris. Chris takes one more hit. We hit the fentanyl and we both went under. At this point, they both nod out. We hit the fentanyl and we both went under. At this point, they both nod out. That's what fentanyl users call it. This initial moment where you basically feel complete and total relaxation and nothingness and you essentially borderline lose consciousness. Josh kind of comes to. He looks up, looks around, and he looks over at Chris

and something doesn't look right. When I did come back, I noticed that his lips were blue and he looks over at Chris and something doesn't look right. When I did come back, I noticed that his lips were blue and he was not conscious. Chris is bent over awkwardly. His chin is down, touching his chest. He's not moving at all. And despite the fog of his own drug use and his own high, he thinks something might really be wrong here with Chris. So he starts tapping him on the shoulder, shaking him. Hey, Chris, wake up. Man, what's going on? And nothing.

Nothing is coming back from Chris at all. So my first thought was, I got to get this guy some help. I was in the driver's seat of the car. So I went ahead and took off, started driving towards the hospital. At this point, to his credit, Josh realizes an emergency is underway, and he needs to get some help. So the hospital is fairly far from where they are. I know that the brain can only survive for four minutes without oxygen. I see his lips are turning blue. I know it's probably been a little bit. Josh knows from his own experience with drugs that you can die of an overdose in

less than five minutes. That's how quickly fatal this synthetic fentanyl can be. I need to go ahead and start doing CPR on him. That way he's getting oxygen to his brain. So I pulled into the nearest filling station, pulled him out of the car, started performing CPR, and hollered at somebody to call 911. So Josh drives to a gas station very nearby where he goes to the attendant office, bangs on the door and says, help, call 911.

My friend is overdosing. And then Josh helps pull his friend out of the passenger seat and lies him flat in the parking lot. And he starts to give his friend CPR mouth to mouth. Josh had worked for a little while in a nursing home where he'd been required to go to a CPR course. And so he has some idea of how to do this. How long do you think you were giving him CPR? Man, it felt like forever. Every minute feels like forever.

Yeah, I'd say for a good eight minutes. I had hollered for if somebody else could help me. Nobody was moving to help me. So I just kept doing, you know, what I could. By the time the ambulance pulls up, Josh is physically drained from performing CPR. He's also terrified and emotionally exhausted because he still doesn't know whether or not his friend is alive or dead. So at this point, Josh has called an ambulance. He's frantically trying to save his friend.

He's performing CPR. He's standing there. The ambulance arrives. He has done everything in his power to save his friend. Exactly. And the only thing in Josh's head at this point is, is Chris going to make it? Is he okay?

That's the question that Josh is asking again and again. First, of the paramedics when the ambulance arrives, and then the police come a few minutes later because they've also heard this call. And Josh is standing with them and asking about Chris. Is he going to be okay? How is he doing? What's happening? But slowly, over those next minutes, the police start asking him a lot of questions too. And what was your conversation with the police officers like?

Well, he had put me in the back of the cop car asking him a lot of questions too. And what was your conversation with the police officers like? Well, he had put me in the back of the cop car and ran my ID. And then he said he was calling in his supervising officer or something like that. And so they did that. And they told me that they wanted to talk to me about what had happened. They want to know, where did the drugs come from? What kind of drugs? Who bought the drugs?

Where did the money come from? Was it shared? Who used the drugs first? I definitely, you know, knew that I was in some trouble. I would be in some trouble. And you figured maybe you'd get in trouble for buying drugs or for smoking fentanyl yourself. Right. Yeah. And slowly it started to dawn on Josh

that this conversation was different than the one that he expected. They weren't all just talking about how Chris was going to be, but they were beginning to talk about who might be responsible. And this conversation turned into an investigation. I was like, look, man, y'all gonna arrest me?

If y'all are, just tell me. And he nodded over to the other officer. And the other officer, that's when he grabbed my arms and put my hands behind my back and told me he was arresting me for murder. And just as the ambulance was taking off Chris, who at that point Josh suspected was dead, the officer said to Josh that he was under arrest for murder in the first degree. When he said murder, what was going through your mind? Oh, man, I was so sick in my stomach

because the only penalties for first-degree murder are life, life without parole, or death penalty. You know, those are the only three options you have with a murder charge. We'll be right back. So, Eli, how did we get to a place where a friend sees that his friend is overdosing, tries to resuscitate him, calls 911, and is charged with a murder at the scene just after a few questions by police? Well, we got here because of an unimaginable amount of death. I mean, fentanyl is killing so many people in the United States. An average of about 200 people a day in this country die

from fentanyl overdoses, mostly accidental fentanyl overdoses. That's more people than are killed by guns every day. It's more people than die in car accidents every day. And so there's been a massive amount of pressure coming from the country to lawmakers to hold somebody accountable. Usher penalties are coming for people caught dealing the dangerous opioid, fentanyl. So what's happened over the last year is these lawmakers have taken that pressure and turned it into legislation. Possession of more than a gram of something that contains fentanyl in the state of Colorado is now a felony.

Not just in red states, but in blue states, frankly in most states. In more than 30 states, we've seen new legislation to try to create harsher punishment for fentanyl dealers and also for fentanyl addicts. The bill designates any substance containing the deadly drug to be considered as a weapon of terrorism. So Virginia, for instance, recently passed a law codifying fentanyl as a weapon of terrorism. The bill will make distributing fentanyl a class four felony. Which gives you a sense of how serious it is. Wow.

A new law takes effect this week targeting the fentanyl crisis here in the Lone Star State. Texas passed a bill that would reclassify fentanyl overdose deaths from being accidents to being poisonings. And that then puts the onus on law enforcement to go out and find who is responsible for those poisonings. Arkansas will charge drug dealers with murder if they deliver drugs that cause an overdose.

Arkansas passed a death by delivery bill in April to charge some overdoses as murders in an effort to deter anyone from selling or even just sharing fentanyl. We hope that this bill pushes the justice system to take this seriously. And a lot of this ends up coming down to local prosecutors who now have pretty wide discretion to charge people with murder after someone dies of an overdose. So in other words, a real toughening of the laws

against fentanyl using the most stringent charge under the law, murder. Yeah, that's exactly right. The challenge, though, is really how to find the people who they want to hold responsible. With something like this drug, the supply right now of these chemicals is mostly manufactured in China, then cartels are producing the drug in Mexico, and then it's trafficked in huge volume into the United States. And eventually, it gets to the street and finally to people like Josh. And most of the times, the street-level transactions

are from one addict to another in small, small volume. And those tend to be the people who get caught. So you have situations where the people actually being held responsible, the ones who are being charged with murder, are people like a 17-year-old in Tennessee who, after graduation, her and two of her friends used fentanyl. They all nodded out in the car. One girl survives. The other two died. And suddenly the 17-year-old girl is being charged as an adult with a murder charge. You have a real estate agent in Florida who throws a party at her house, provides some drugs for the guests of her party. One of those people dies.

The real estate agent calls 911 and then finds that she herself is arrested for murder. You've got a high schooler who meets a girl in church in Ozark, Missouri, and he says, hey, I've got some fentanyl. She would like some. He gives her a pill. He gives her instructions and says, only take half. Do it this way. Call me at this moment. She takes the whole pill. She dies. And now this 17-year-old kid in Ozark, Missouri is also being charged with murder. So oftentimes you have very small-time dealers or really just users who end up being the ones who are caught because

they're the easiest people to catch. And that's what happened to Josh. Exactly. Yeah, the prosecutors in this case said that Josh essentially acted as a middleman. He was the one who knew where to get drugs. He was the one who knew the dealer. He was the one who knew how to get there. He procured the drugs and then shared them with his friend, which to them meant that Josh was essentially a dealer. He could be held responsible. So this is really hard, right? You have this raging epidemic, truly one of the biggest problems our country is facing right now, and the country's desperate to remedy the situation, so a very real problem.

But then this arrest for murder, like in Josh's case, doesn't really seem like the right fix. Like it seems like we're overcorrecting. I think it depends on who you ask. A lot of lawmakers in this country have decided that based on their constituents' anger and pain and fear around the fentanyl epidemic, the correct fix is to pass the harshest laws possible, which they hope will act as some kind of a deterrent to people who might deal or use fentanyl. But in terms of whether or not this will solve the problem, I think that gets into a much bigger, more existential question about where we are in America. Because what it looks like to solve the addiction crisis right now means keeping people alive when they're addicted and then trying to help them get better. And that means Narcan and medications to help them get clean and access to rehab, which is a major challenge in this country. And then once they're done with rehab, long-term beds and

medical care and mental health care so that people aren't discharged, newly cleaned, back to tents on the street, surrounded by fentanyl that sells for a dollar a pill, because that's not a recipe for success. And even bigger than that, it means addressing all of these things that right now, tragically, are endemic in American life and on the rise, such as sense of despair, bad healthcare outcomes, rising wealth inequality, loneliness, all of these things that we know drive people to addiction in the first place, right? So the answers to what is the fix are really, really difficult. So at some point, it gets a lot easier and a lot more doable to say, hey, this person provided the drugs in

this case. This is the person who's responsible. Let's answer the question this way. Right. This going after the little guy who's very often himself a drug user feels like we're doing something, but it's not doing anything to fix the problem. That's right. I mean, I think Josh is confused at why he gave the name of the drug dealer who sold them the drugs to the police, a guy named Shug. And Shug was never found or arrested or held accountable. The only one who's been held accountable is Josh. And what about the families of the victims? I mean, they would appear to be pretty important parties here when we're talking about prosecution, right? Like, who do they think should be held responsible? I think it's really different in every case, right? That's

a really personal question about how people grieve. You have parent groups who are saying, you know, our teenagers are being given these pills and are dying at sleepovers. We want whoever to be held accountable and to be held accountable to the full extent of the law. And I can understand why. Like, you want a punishment that meets the absolute magnitude of the loss.

And the magnitude of the loss is unspeakable. So it's different in every case. For Chris, his family was mostly confused about why Josh had been arrested for murder. Chris's grandmother, when she was told that Josh was being charged for murder, her first reaction was, for what? And when the actual circumstances were described to her

that they'd shared these drugs, they'd smoked them together, they'd bought them together, she frankly thought, like, this doesn't make any sense. So she doesn't blame Josh at all? No. I mean, if anything, I think she feels some gratitude to Josh, first for being a friend to her grandson at a really difficult moment in his life, but mostly for trying to save his life. And how is Josh doing now? When was the last time you guys talked?

We're in close touch. You know, Josh has a lot of time. He's lonely. And I always am happy to talk to him. I like talking to him. So we talk every few days. I mean, is your own personal safety an issue in there? Are you worried about that?

Not anymore. You know, I was at first, you know. But now people know me. Nobody really tries to press me or take advantage of me anymore. You know, I mean... And I also still talk a lot to his mom and to his family. And for his mom, you know, when Josh went to jail,

her one solace was that she thought, at least now he'll be safe. Like he's not going to be sleeping under the abandoned porch. He's not going to be able to use fentanyl all the time. He's not going to overdose. But what actually is true, surprising to her and to me, is that there is fentanyl all over the jail. Oh yeah, they warned me coming in. They were like, look, the stuff they got in here is even more potent than the stuff they got on the streets. so don't do it.

And on his first days in jail, he started buying some of this fentanyl from other inmates and using it. I was really, really low. You know, I was like, man, my life is over with this time, you know. Using it to escape his own grief over Chris's death, his own pain over his situation. I can't say that I was trying to overdose on purpose, but I can't say subconsciously that I wasn't either. And soon after Josh got in jail, he took a massive amount of fentanyl and overdosed.

So your overdose is probably like two or three days after Chris's overdose? Well, actually about four. Yeah, about four days after. Wow. Yeah. And that's how Josh's time in jail started. He's now been clean from fentanyl for three months. How was work working there today?

I was good, you know. He's managed to nurture his faith a little bit in the chapel at the jail, helping other people read the Bible, talking to them about their faith for a few hours a day. The pastors up there, they like me a lot, you know, and usually on Friday, they'll get me a little lunch and we'll have lunch together and stuff. So that's always nice. So little by little, you know, Josh started to find a routine in there that maybe works for him to get from one day to the next. And then just in this last week, Josh had to make a really difficult decision about how long he's going to be in prison. The prosecutors in this case had looked at it again and had decided that they were willing to reduce the charges and give Josh a chance to plea to first-degree

manslaughter. The other choice that Josh could have made was to take the case to trial and to put his fate at the whims of a system that right now he doesn't have a lot of faith in. So, Josh decided last week to take the plea and he will be in jail for a while because he now has pled guilty to first degree manslaughter. So he's taking responsibility for Chris's death? Yeah, he's taking responsibility for Chris's death, which he doesn't think is the right thing. His lawyer doesn't necessarily believe it's the just thing. But I think what Josh decided was it was the smartest course of action. It gives him a chance to get home,

to get back to his mom, to get back to his life much sooner than if he were risking it at a jury trial, which would be a significant gamble. And given the fact that Josh is going to spend a number of years in prison, looking back, would he have done anything differently?

That's something that we've talked about a lot. I mean, how often are you thinking about Chris in there? And like, have you had a chance to grieve? You've had so much going on yourself. Yeah, you know, I mean, and that comes and goes, you know? You know, he could have done so many things differently. And up until the moment that they used drugs, I think Josh would have done everything differently in his life, almost.

But from the moment that they both took their first hit of fentanyl, Josh feels like he made the right decisions. I don't think I could have lived with myself if I had chosen anything different. If I hadn't at least tried to do everything that I could, you know, to help him, I feel like it would have been a lot heavier burden on my soul that like, maybe I could have done something differently. You know, if anything, it would have been to not even get the drugs in the first place. You know, unfortunately being in active addiction, that's not much of an option for you. He didn't leave the car. He didn't run away.

He stayed with his friend. He tried to give him CPR. He got help. He did whatever he could to save his friend's life. And actually, the fact that he did that, even though it's put him in jail, Josh has said to me many times, he feels like it's those actions of decency

that have a chance to save him. He knows that when the chips were down, he did what he feels like were the right things. And that's an easier way to go about living your life than feeling like you have let a friend die without trying to help them. So this day that's landed him in prison for a long time is actually a day he's really proud of. That's exactly right. I think he thinks it's actually one of the greatest acts of heroism in his life,

in a life that he feels really mixed feelings about. He's made a ton of mistakes, but helping Chris and trying to save him was not one of those mistakes in Josh's mind. I tried to do everything I could for him. And, you know, it just kind of felt like it was futile almost. But I spent a lot of years beating myself up for my grandfather dying and thinking that I could have done something differently. And when I did have the opportunity to help somebody else who was dying and they

still died anyways, I feel like almost that was God showing me that it was His providence that He, you know, He allowed somebody to live or not live. And, you know, maybe it was just their time. Yeah. But still, it doesn't make it very much easier. Eli, thank you. Thanks so much. We'll be right back. Rupert Murdoch is retiring from the Fox and News Corporation boards and making his son, Lachlan, the sole executive in charge of the powerful global media empire that he built from a local newspaper concern in Australia 70 years ago. The move puts his business, which includes the influential 24-hour news and opinion network, the Fox News Channel, more firmly under his son's control, a year ahead of the 2024

presidential election. The Times reports that a succession battle may still loom. Murdoch, who is 92, put a plan in place two decades ago that his four adult children would have to work out his ultimate successor among themselves when he dies. And the Biden administration said that it would allow hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already in the United States, but without legal status, to live and work legally in the country for 18 months. The decision will affect about 472,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the country before July 31st, temporarily protecting them from removal and waiving a months-long waiting period for them to seek employment authorization. Top New York Democrats had lobbied intensely for the move, arguing that roughly half the

migrants currently living in New York City are Venezuelans and that the city's safety net would tear under their weight unless they were allowed to work and support themselves. Today's episode was produced by Moosh Zady and Will Reed, with help from Diana Nguyen and Olivia Nat. It was edited by Michael Benoit, fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Diane Wong, Alicia Baetube, Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Bunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.