Maylia Sotelo arrived in a black Cadillac. It pulled down an alley by the Fox River, which cuts through the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. On that Tuesday evening in November 2022, she stepped out of a rear door and into another car. Maylia was 15 years old and slight, with a soft, girlish face and large, upturned eyes. For $50, she sold a man five “blues,” round pills stamped with “M30” that passed for Percocet. Narcotics investigators from the Brown County Drug Task Force were listening over a wire and, within minutes, their informant turned over his buy. Like every fake Percocet the task force seized that year, the pills were actually fentanyl. The officers, though, decided to let Maylia leave.
Maylia was comfortable around the business of drugs. Her childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers; hollowed-out pens littered the floors, and strange men let themselves in at all hours. She had grown up with three older sisters, who had all been kicked out or left because of their mother’s violence. It fell to Maylia to protect Maliasyn, two years younger, from their mom’s unpredictable delusions. She would lose herself in uppers and opioids, start yelling out of nowhere or cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, she locked the girls in the house for days.
Before Maylia sold blues, she sold weed. She had been smoking since fifth grade. The first time she tried weed, she found herself laughing at nothing. “Why would I sit here being sad and sober when I can be high and happy?” she thought. She hated staying home, so after class, she took Maliasyn to a trap house where teens smoked blunts on the first floor and adults met in the bedrooms upstairs. The guys there, a couple of years older, were dropping out of school to sell weed. When Maylia was 13, she started dealing, too, because everyone was doing it.
By the start of her sophomore year at West High School, blues had overtaken bud in popularity. Across the city, boys blared songs about popping percs (“Yeah, just popped a 30, yeah, a 30 / It could change your life or it could ruin it, that’s the dirty”), and blue circle emojis with an “M” dominated Snapchat and Facebook. Maylia didn’t use percs. Like everyone at West, she knew they were fake, but nobody talked about what that meant. Instead of the oxycodone in Percocet, the pills contained filler and fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.
Two days after the drug task force confirmed that Maylia was selling fentanyl, she arranged through a friend to buy a bulk order of blues from a man she’d never met. The city was facing a dry spell, so instead of her typical hundred-pill order from her usual source, she asked the man for a thousand. When her friend delivered the percs, she poured them onto a tray in her lap and pushed each chalky pill with a key, counting them one by one. She texted her customers: “Back in motion.” The next day, she caught a ride to an apartment complex and sold a pill to a teenager named Jack McDonough.
Early the following week, Maylia told Maliasyn that she’d be home soon, put on her “Sesame Street” slides and settled into the passenger seat of a friend’s Audi Q5. He drove her to Culver’s for a strawberry milkshake and then to Taco Bell for a sale. When they parked, lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Drug task force agents in unmarked cars rushed in and Maylia was handcuffed. “I don’t think you can do that,” she said quietly, as an officer went to pat her down. “I’m a minor.”
Agents took Maylia to a juvenile detention center in Fond du Lac, an hour south of Green Bay, and booked her on drug charges. Since she had no criminal history, the prosecutor and a county caseworker began negotiating with Maylia’s attorney. They presented a consent decree, the juvenile justice equivalent of a deferred prosecution agreement, which proposed that Maylia could be released to her father, whom she barely knew, placed on an ankle monitor, and required to satisfy certain conditions, like attending therapy or substance abuse counseling. If Maylia complied for six months, her charges could be dropped. After Christmas, while her dad was preparing his home, the county moved her into the less restrictive setting of shelter care, a coed house for kids.
In early January, a month after the arrest, a police officer arrived looking for Maylia. She was in the shower, getting ready for a hearing where she expected to be let out. Instead of taking her to court, the officer drove her to jail. There, he told her that she was under arrest for first-degree reckless homicide. Jack McDonough had died of an overdose.
Maylia would be the first juvenile in Wisconsin charged with homicide for providing the fentanyl that led to a death. In a country flooded with the drug, at a time when teens were dying from opioids at record rates, far outpacing plans to help them, she would be treated as an adult by a justice system that has no clear guidelines for how to handle the kids who are selling.
Jack McDonough first tried blues a year earlier, at the age of 17. With his girlfriend, he learned to crush the pill on a swatch of tinfoil, run a lighter underneath it and inhale the smoke through a straw. Calm blanketed them, muting their anxiety. Sometimes, it triggered a surge of confidence, a feeling that anything was doable. More often, it let them drift into nothingness, a fuzzy space between wakefulness and sleep. “We thought we were doing Percocets,” his girlfriend told me. “I didn’t even really know what a perc was.” At first, they smoked the pills a few times each week, sitting in Jack’s car between classes at Southwest High. Within a couple months, they needed one a day or they’d be sick — vomiting, legs shaking, unable to sleep. “I told Jack that I’m pretty sure it’s not even real percs, I’m pretty sure it’s fentanyl, and he was like, ‘What? No. I’m not doing fentanyl.’”
Until recently, opioids almost exclusively claimed the lives of adults. Since COVID-19 began, though, the rate of overdose deaths among teenagers has rocketed, more than doubling in three years. It’s not that more teens are using drugs, but that fentanyl has made the supply deadlier than ever. Many know or discover that the pills on the street are tainted but don’t want to stop — until they can’t. In a matter of weeks or a couple of months, they’ve become addicted. Today, over 300,000 kids under 18 are estimated to have an opioid-use disorder.
As fentanyl has rapidly entered the world of adolescents, the major institutions that touch teens’ lives have been unprepared to manage the fallout. Few doctors are offering the recommended medication, most schools are ill-equipped to help, and the justice system is treating children as criminals. Parents don’t know what to look for: the straws, the ash marks, the weight loss, the nausea of withdrawals. Teens are on their own. With nowhere to turn, each week, 22 high-school-aged kids — a classroom’s worth — are dying from overdose.
Jack’s parents had separated when he was an infant, and he’d grown up with his mom, Carrie, who owned a small house in De Pere, a suburb of Green Bay, and worked in sales at a truck maintenance supply company. He saw his father on weekends and holidays and in the summer. Carrie is warm and effusive, a self-labeled “helicopter parent,” with a deadpan sense of humor. Jack preferred body comedy, jump-scaring anyone he could. If he wanted to learn karate, Carrie booked him classes; if he wanted to swim with friends, she drove them to the water park. Together, the two worked out, volunteered to walk rescue dogs, went shopping, talked through plays he could run on his basketball team. After Carrie remarried when Jack was 11, he continued to confide in her about his insecurities and offered updates on his various crushes.
By high school, Jack was a gangly 6 foot 3, and he preferred duck hunting to sitting in class. At Southwest, 4 miles from Maylia’s school, he kept falling behind. He had trouble believing in himself: He told his mom he thought he was too slow. She would stay up late helping him with homework or she’d do it for him when he gave up. With his friend Mason, he liked to break down old cars just to fix them back up. The two clicked “like Buzz and Woody,” Mason told me. They would wrestle in public, but “behind closed doors, he was like a teddy bear.”
Credit:
Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Carrie Harrison.
The winter he started smoking percs, Jack cut out most of his friends. In early 2022, he began buying from a young dealer who went by Speakers, and soon he was introduced to other teens who were selling. Within a couple months, he dropped 15 pounds. Carrie worried he was bulimic. She would press her ear against the bathroom door, listening for hints of purging. He’d always been sweet and respectful, but that semester, he started disobeying her, becoming hostile out of nowhere. On weekends, he racked up speeding tickets and broke curfew; Carrie and her husband, Ryan, clamped a wheel lock on his car. On weekdays, he retreated to his room after school and went to bed at sundown. Carrie had no idea, but he often video-chatted with his girlfriend so the two could smoke percs at the same time.
Carrie booked him a therapy appointment, but the first slot she could get was a few months out. She told his school counselor that she thought he was using drugs but says she was brushed off. Carrie couldn’t prove anything — the drug tests she randomly gave Jack kept coming back negative. Others, though, knew what was going on. A classmate texted saying that he had lost two friends and didn’t want to see Jack die, too. “1 perk can’t kill you lmao, you’d have to smoke like 10 perks to even think abt overdosing,” Jack replied. “It just gets you high, for like an hour.” Mason also worried, and he sometimes probed Jack, who swung from denial to regret. “He knew he was addicted,” Mason said. “He knew it was hurting the people around him. He also knew he couldn’t stop on his own.”
In April of 2022, Carrie got a call from Tracy Liska, a police officer assigned to Southwest. Jack had been caught going door to door, pretending to fundraise for St. John’s Homeless Shelter — a place Maylia’s mom sometimes stayed. Liska had heard rumors that kids at school were using fake Percocet, which she knew was probably fentanyl, but she couldn’t search them unless she had reason to believe they had pills on them. Jack was “attached at the hip” to his girlfriend, “so in love,” Liska told me, and kids said she was using. When Carrie arrived at her office, stammering that something wasn’t right with Jack, Liska told her that a classmate was calling him a “perkhead.” Back home, Carrie took Jack’s phone and started scrolling. She found streams of texts setting up deals to buy “erks” and photos and videos of Jack smoking them.
Carrie didn’t know that the gold-standard treatment for teens addicted to opioids is buprenorphine, a long-acting opioid that strips away withdrawal symptoms and cravings and protects against overdose. Each year, on average, only 372 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 are getting the drug, according to the best national data. Most pediatricians aren’t trained in addiction and don’t feel comfortable prescribing the medication, and many clinics are afraid of the liability that comes with treating minors. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only 39 rehabs in the country offer buprenorphine to those under 18. Carrie called the most comprehensive national resource hotline in the country, run by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; it pointed her to Libertas, one of the only centers for adolescents in Green Bay. But when she reached Libertas, which doesn’t offer buprenorphine to kids, it had closed its inpatient program for teens.
After five days of calls to every rehab she could find, Carrie heard back from a residential facility in Minnesota, a Hazelden Betty Ford clinic. For the first time, it seemed like she’d found a solution. Before Jack left home, he wrote to his girlfriend’s mom to say that her daughter needed help. “We chose the wrong road to walk, and it is worse than I thought,” he texted. “I need you to make sure you keep her away from these kinds of drugs no matter what the case is. I can’t lose her to addiction, she is going to tell you that she hates you and tell you things to make you feel terrible about yourself and your job as a parent. But what I feel for her is real love and I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t care.” To his mom, he scribbled, “I’m trying to do better to be a better son. I hope you can forgive me for everything.”
Credit:
Courtesy of Carrie Harrison
The same spring that Jack entered rehab, Maylia was introduced to blues by her older sister Marianna. Since leaving home at the age of 13, Marianna had been bouncing between relatives and a boyfriend, between a local shelter and the back seat of a car. She’d sold weed to support herself, and then she’d leveled up to percs. She’d climbed so high that some considered her Green Bay’s biggest dealer.
Maylia was captivated by her sister — she was “self-made and self-paid.” Marianna could buy at $3 a pill and sell at $20. At 18, she owned a midnight blue Mercedes Benz and an apartment on Imperial Lane, the main stretch in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She had decorated it with silver-studded couches and filled it with a collection of Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton purses. With their mom caught up in her own addiction, Marianna took the girls in. Often, when she crisscrossed the city selling, Maylia sat shotgun, looking out for cops. She took photos of her sister, draped in long, neon-orange wigs, smirking next to 4-foot stacks of cash. Sometimes, they flashed fans of bills together.
In August of 2022, Marianna was arrested for dealing fentanyl and held in Brown County Jail. Maylia and Maliasyn went to stay with their grandmother, a manager at Family Dollar, who they said rarely stocked the kitchen. Soon, Maylia’s phone would not stop ringing. Marianna’s clients were asking if she had any idea where they could buy blues. “Money kept calling,” Maylia said. “It was calling me.”
Through Marianna’s contacts, Maylia bought a hundred pills for $500. She could double her money in a day. In the mornings before school, she tucked a handful of pills in her panties and another handful in her purse. Customers came to her. The 19-year-olds told the 18-year-olds, who told the 17-year-olds, and then the kids she had known as infants. Maylia was a good student with a quiet, observant demeanor. She didn’t like to sell on campus. Sometimes, classmates begged. The stink, like burnt popcorn, hung in the girls’ bathroom. Kids walked the hallways scratching their faces.
The only experience Maylia enjoyed more than smoking weed was surprising Maliasyn with a gift and seeing the look on her face. “Sometimes, I just wished that everything, everybody around us, would disappear, and it could just be me and my sister,” she said. Maylia hid packets of ramen and goldfish and hot Cheetos around their bedroom; she bought Maliasyn pink low-top Nike Dunks and brought home a PlayStation a customer had traded for blues. She promised she’d stop selling once she’d saved $3,000 for a car, which she couldn’t yet buy because she wasn’t old enough to drive. Maliaysn reminded her to be smooth and slow down. Instead, she kept going. “Her name was ringing in the streets,” a competing dealer told me. Maylia loved being one of the only girls in the game. For as long as she could remember, people had called her Princess. Now they called her Hollywood, for her big curly wigs, thick feline lashes and how little interest she showed in the kids at school.
Credit:
Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Maylia’s sisters.
Maylia knew that people were overdosing, but she didn’t realize that a tiny amount of fentanyl could kill: 2 milligrams, which, if poured on a penny, would only cover Abraham Lincoln’s ear. On Dec. 1, 2022, just after the informant bought from Maylia, a customer told her that his girlfriend died from pills and he didn’t want to use anymore. Maylia sent her condolences, adding: “im glad you thinkin smarter.” Two days later, she saw Jack’s girlfriend’s Facebook story announcing that Jack had died. She’d hung out with his girlfriend once and messaged right away. “I’m so sorry for your loss mami keep your head up 💔,” she wrote. “Can I asked what happened?”
Jack had returned to Green Bay that fall. He’d spent 24 days at Hazelden, where he told staff that he didn’t have a problem. This wasn’t unusual. Jack’s counselor attributed his resistance to “significant shame and fear” and predicted that Jack would open up. He never did. The counselor noted in his file that Jack had a moderate Percocet disorder but made no mention of fentanyl. Nor did a doctor prescribe buprenorphine or explain the importance of the medication to Carrie. (Though Hazelden was given a medical release form, a spokesperson said it would not comment on Jack’s care for confidentiality reasons.)
In May, Jack was discharged to his dad, who had moved to Arizona. Carrie begged him to stay there and start over, but once Jack turned 18, he came back, moving in with his grandparents. Mason saw Jack once, in late November, and he could tell that he was still using. He told Jack he wouldn’t speak to him until he stopped.
On Dec. 2, Jack went to his girlfriend’s house and logged into her Facebook. He ordered a pill from Maylia. It was the first time he had bought from her. At 9 p.m., he took an Uber home, changed into his pajamas and kissed his grandmother goodnight. “Mmm you should smoke wimme mamita ❤️,” he texted his girlfriend hours later. The next morning, when his grandparents couldn’t open his bedroom door, they called the police. Officers found him sitting cross-legged in bed, unresponsive.
It wasn’t until Carrie arrived at her parents’ house that morning that she realized Jack was using fentanyl. She had always thought he was smoking real Percocet, which was terrifying enough. But as she tried to keep breathing, she noticed that the officers weren’t touching Jack’s belongings, as if any contact could kill. She had no idea that all the fake Percocet in town now contained fentanyl. Tracy Liska, the police officer at Southwest, hadn’t told her. (Liska says she must have mentioned fentanyl, though she didn’t note this in her reports.) The Drug Enforcement Administration was claiming that 60% of all fentanyl-laced pills it analyzed were potentially lethal, but the person on the federal government hotline hadn’t warned her, either. Hazelden hadn’t tested Jack’s urine for fentanyl or told Carrie that Percocet bought on the street was often contaminated with the drug. “You think you’ve talked to the police, doctors, teachers,” she said. “I didn’t fathom that it would be fentanyl.”
Aaron Hanson, the De Pere detective assigned to investigate Jack’s death, was the first person in a position of authority who seemed to care about Jack and want to do something for him. He checked in often, keeping Carrie apprised of what he was uncovering. After Jack’s autopsy confirmed that the cause of death was fentanyl intoxication, Hanson told her that the state would be pursuing a homicide charge. The term “homicide” didn’t seem to fit — she pictured a person shooting a gun or wielding a knife — but she was relieved to hear that a dealer would be taken off the streets. In early January of 2023, Hanson let her know that the seller was a 15-year-old girl. She would be charged as an adult. Carrie had imagined an older man with clout, maybe a warehouse full of drugs. “How could this happen? Any of it?” she wondered. She also thought, “Put her away.”
Over the past 15 years, as the number of opioid overdoses has risen sharply, leaders in law enforcement have promoted homicide charges as a key component of the nation’s response. The goal, they say, is to send a message that dealing drugs comes with great risk. Prosecutions have soared in the 30 states with the statutes on the books. Wisconsin is one of the most aggressive. Its counties filed nearly 400 cases between 2019 and 2023. The charges often attach to friends or relatives or partners who use with the person who overdosed rather than people who deal in any significant quantity. Even when the charges fall on habitual drug sellers, they rarely reach high-level operators. With each step up the distribution ladder, causation is tougher to prove, so the typical investigation ends with the person who delivered the drugs. These sellers, like Maylia, tend to have no control over whether the pills are cut with fentanyl or, if they are, whether it’s a fatal dose.
When the person who provides the drug is a teen and the charge is homicide, most states allow or require the accused to be treated as an adult. These laws are a legacy of the 1990s tough-on-crime era, when criminologists and politicians warned of “super-predators” and an imminent “bloodbath” from teen violence. The prediction never materialized, but almost every state passed laws that made it easier to transfer minors into the adult system. In at least 31 states, a child charged with certain serious crimes, like rape or homicide, must be tried in adult criminal court, according to recent research by Juvenile Law Center. Eight additional states allow prosecutors to choose whether to file in juvenile or criminal court. (In some, like Wisconsin, defendants can request to be tried in the juvenile system.) In 2019, the last year for which there is data, an estimated 53,000 juveniles were charged in adult criminal courts because judges, prosecutors or state law transferred them there.
Once the homicide charge was filed against Maylia, under the law, she morphed from dealer to killer, then from juvenile to adult. In Wisconsin, anyone older than 9 charged with homicide — whether it’s violent or drug-induced — is automatically sent to adult criminal court. When the officer picked up Maylia at shelter care with a warrant for her arrest, he drove her to Brown County Jail.
“This is big-boy jail,” Maylia thought as she walked into the booking room, where adults sat on benches. It’s where Marianna was. Brown County Jail had no designated area for girls, so Maylia was led down a dark hallway into an adult section, where men in orange jumpsuits were housed. There, she was held in a separate cell with another girl. Instead of the board game marathons, arts and crafts afternoons and school days she’d grown used to in juvenile detention, Maylia got a deck of cards, permission to walk laps, and an hour or two of classes.
In February of 2023, Trisha Fritz, the attorney assigned to Maylia by the public defenders’ office, asked the judge to move the homicide case to juvenile court. She knew chances were slim, but in criminal court, Maylia would be subject to the same sentencing guidelines as adults, which are focused on retribution and deterrence; she could face up to 40 years in prison. The goal of most juvenile courts, by contrast, is to balance public safety with rehabilitation and the best interests of the child. In a juvenile correctional facility, teens get clinical counseling, skills classes, education and, through their participation, the chance to earn their return to the community.
The juvenile system is notoriously erratic, but there’s little question that a judge there would take into account the circumstances of Maylia’s childhood and whether child protective services had intervened. Before Maylia turned 1, CPS documented that her mother overdosed on cocaine and Adderall with seven children in her home. When she was 5, a caller told the agency that Maylia’s mom was “high as a kite” and her boyfriend was violent. The next year, a mandated reporter alerted CPS that there was “absolutely no food in the home” and that the kids witnessed their mother using heroin. When she was 7, there was a substantiated finding that a man “opened his pants, pulled out his penis and masturbated” in front of one of Maylia’s sisters. That same year, a woman overdosed on crack in the house; a social worker wrote that Maylia’s mom “would not call rescue or the police because [she] did not want her children removed.” An elementary school employee reported that Maylia missed half the school year. After Maylia turned 8, CPS noted that her mom allegedly started hitting her.
When social workers came to the front door, Maylia’s mom ignored them. She told the girls to lay down and be quiet. When the agency called, she let the phone ring to voicemail. (Maylia’s mom could not be reached for comment.) During Maylia’s childhood, 20 referrals were made to CPS. The agency’s policy directed staff to note when they tried to make contact with a parent, but there was no requirement to do anything more. CPS could only identify a “maltreater” if staff interviewed that person or found other evidence, like a police report. Workers kept noting that Maylia’s mom had “referrals in all areas of child protection; sexual abuse to her children allegations, neglect, homelessness, drinking, drug history, relationship issues,” but she refused to meet with them. Going no further, staff closed case after case.
Credit:
Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Mariah Zimmer.
When Maylia was 14, child protection workers saw that her mother was hallucinating, revealing a “detachment from reality,” and they decided that the girls should no longer be under her care. The agency, though, offered no assistance with counseling or school. Maylia and Maliasyn began shuttling between the homes of their older sisters and their grandmother. Imani Hollie, a former Brown County public defender who represented Maylia when CPS finally got involved, told me that she’d seen the agency fail to protect kids in all sorts of extreme situations, but Maylia’s case stood out. Social workers had ignored her needs since she was an infant, and when the state did act, it sent her directly to criminal court. “Everyone,” Hollie said, “wanted to back away and treat her as an adult, rather than, ‘This is a child who is in the system, who has lived through horrendous allegations, and who went 14 years without any intervention.’”
As Fritz was preparing for a hearing on moving Maylia’s homicide case to juvenile court, she was struck by two pages in the narcotics investigation report. The Brown County Drug Task Force had learned that Maylia was selling fentanyl three days before she sold to Jack, but they didn’t arrest her. They could have requested a search warrant for her phone. They could have continued surveilling her or notified child protective services. They could have brought her in for dealing. Why, instead, did they let a minor continue handling a potentially lethal substance?
The drug task force, like most law enforcement agencies, has no internal guidelines governing interactions with suspects under the age of 18. In a series of cases referred to as the Miller trilogy, named after the 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that children are different in the eyes of the law. Relying on brain science and psychological research, it found that children “have limited ‘control over their own environment’ and lack the ability to extricate themselves from horrific, crime-producing settings.” They are more impulsive, more easily pressured, less capable of assessing consequences and more capable of change than adults. These rulings have led the country through major reforms in the juvenile justice system, particularly when it comes to sentencing. But they have not led to much change in law enforcement.
Nicholas Ronsman, who was 27 and a first-year narcotics investigator on the drug task force, had no issue treating a 15-year-old as he would an adult. He learned about Maylia when he asked an informant for a list of dealers along with their prices for blues; whoever charged the least, he reasoned, had the largest supply. The informant knew the girl by her Facebook name, and she was offering the best prices. Ronsman passed her profile page to an intel analyst, who found that it belonged to Maylia. “At first I was like, ‘She’s 15, she can’t be that big of a player,’” Ronsman told me. “But then I look at her family, her sister Marianna.”
Ronsman had worked Marianna’s case. His team had confiscated $11,329 and about 8,400 fake Percocet pills at her grandmother’s place while Maylia and Maliasyn were there. (Soon after, they seized $27,200 more from another apartment.) The drug task force has a protocol to report to CPS whenever they encounter minors who are living in a house with narcotics, but the officers never did. (“We were not aware of any kids in the house,” Matthew Ronk, the director of the task force, told me. Probation agents found the drugs, so when they called for task force assistance, he said, his officers saw no need to do their own room-to-room search.) By the time Maylia’s name came to Ronsman, she was no longer just a child deserving of safety but a suspect. “We figured, ‘Hey, she probably learned from her sister, she’s got to learn from somewhere.’ So that was my mindset: She’s 15, but she’s got connections, she probably might be a legitimate, larger target.”
Once the informant completed the buy, Ronsman believed that if he arrested Maylia, a juvenile intake worker would likely release her and she’d go back to selling. “The goal of juvenile justice isn’t to put juveniles in prison, which it shouldn’t be. It’s obviously to get them help,” he told me. “So, from my experience with selling a controlled substance, they would have let her out.” As a narcotics investigator, he is a mandatory reporter, but he didn’t think connecting her with social workers was the answer, either. “If I called CPS and they go talk to her, and she says, ‘No, I’m not selling fentanyl, blah blah blah,’ would that do anything? Who knows? Also, it would have interfered with any investigation.”
In the summer of 2023, six months after Maylia’s arrest, she was shuttled from jail to Brown County Circuit Court for her transfer hearing. Carrie sat in the gallery with Ryan and her parents. Ronsman took the stand. He testified that in a shoebox in Maylia’s bedroom, his team had found 775 pills and $3,976. He said he had gone through Maylia’s text messages and found that the average age of the customers he could identify was 18. When Wendy Lemkuil, the prosecutor, asked if Maylia was the largest known fentanyl dealer in Brown County schools, he said that she was.
Fritz cross-examined him. Ronsman had documented two instances in which Maylia had sold at West High School. “Yeah,” he said. She wanted to know how he would explain his decision to do nothing when he first discovered that Maylia was selling.
“So, fentanyl is dangerous?” she asked Ronsman in court.
“Correct,” he said.
“And the drug task force had information that Ms. Sotelo sold five fentanyl pills to somebody Nov. 29 of 2022, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And did not arrest her?”
“That’s correct.”
“Why?”
“It’s our common policy and procedure in the Brown County Drug Task Force to build a case, to show that there is a habit of selling drugs and that they just didn’t sell drugs one time.”
At first, Carrie thought she must have misheard. She noticed her body shaking, and Ronsman’s low-pitched voice — “build a case” — repeated in her head. She couldn’t comprehend that the officers knew Maylia was selling fentanyl days before Jack died and did not arrest her. The police department had been the first institution that appeared to believe that Jack’s life mattered. Jack’s school counselor had dismissed Carrie’s concerns, the local clinics were no help, the staff at Hazelden hadn’t provided guidance. The police had made it seem like this investigation was for Jack. Now she realized that he didn’t mean anything to the officers: He wasn’t a person to them but a piece of evidence to be used against Maylia.
After each hearing, Maylia turned on the news and watched herself in handcuffs. The anchors parroted the prosecutor’s language, calling her “the largest dealer of fentanyl in Brown County schools.” She wasn’t the largest — she knew bigger — and she hated any insinuation that she was malicious or uncaring. Still, she started to grasp how she came across to others. Maylia had never paid attention to the news before, and now she kept seeing segments on fentanyl, hearing there was an epidemic. She had assumed that only a mixture of many drugs could kill, but kids were dying from a single fake Percocet. “Before, it was like, ‘I’m doing drugs, they’re doing drugs, everybody does drugs,’” she told me.
Often, Maylia spoke about herself as if she were split in two. There was a former Maylia, who was rash and inattentive, and a present Maylia, who had insight. The first Maylia, as she saw it, had been so self-deluded or naive that she let herself believe that she wasn’t causing harm: Her buyers would find percs even if she wasn’t the one selling. She started off thinking she was helping Maliasyn and was soon seduced by the money. “I thought for a long time that the way out of this labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small self-sufficient world in a back corner,” she wrote in her journal. That version of Maylia hadn’t even considered the consequences for Marianna. “I don’t know why it didn’t click for me that she’d just got indicted,” she told me.
When the former Maylia got to jail, she blamed everyone around her. Her mother, who left her to fend for herself. The customer who snitched. Even Jack, who came back to Green Bay and decided to use. She couldn’t understand why he kept smoking percs after he’d had the chance to get sober. Maylia couldn’t blame Marianna — they carried the same unspoken memories, like veterans from the same squad. Each day on her way to class, Maylia passed Marianna, who was waiting in her cell. Behind glass, she curled her fingers into a heart and mouthed, “I miss you.” Maylia marveled at how pretty she looked.
The other Maylia, the one in the present, blamed herself and felt disgusted. When the judge quickly rejected her request to move the homicide case to juvenile court, she accepted that she would be going to prison, but she no longer saw herself as a victim. After Marianna was sentenced to eight years in federal prison, Maylia wasn’t outraged, either. It was a long time, she thought, but it could have been worse. She rarely brought up the violence in her home, and when she talked about it at all, she downplayed it. Her mom didn’t “strangle” Marianna, she just “grabbed her by the neck.” Her sisters always said that their mother was an addict, and while she didn’t think that was wrong, she hated when they said it. “She was just — she didn’t know how to be a mother.” Maylia wrote in her journal that while her upbringing had affected her decision-making, she could determine her own future. “I contributed to creating my current experience,” she wrote. “I can now make conscious choices which will bring the changes I want!”
Part of this shift came from reading; for the first time in her life, she could count on three meals a day, which allowed her to relax. She was attending Bible study and devouring books — Joyce Meyer’s “Battlefield of the Mind,” Oprah Winfrey’s “What Happened to You?” At night, she took notes on trauma’s effects on the brain and how to break a “generational curse.”
It was the stories of fellow inmates that transformed her perspective on addiction. She had always tried to keep distance from her customers, but in jail, many were incarcerated with her. She watched one teenager beg her mother to allow her back into her home — the pitch of her voice rising, banging the phone around, yelling she’d stop using — and get nowhere. She’d hear adults say that the first thing they planned to do when they got out was get high. She had previously thought that using was a choice; now she understood that the opioids were in control. She watched a 17-year-old girl try to sleep through withdrawals, too weak to stand to shower, peeing herself. Another had been found facedown in a snowbank, near dead. Often, she thought about Jack and how she wished she could tell him what she’d seen and what she’d learned. She hated that she had fed her customers’ darkest impulses. Many had childhoods similar to hers: parents with addiction, abuse in the home, the shame of abandonment. “They just took a different way out.”
In the 15 years before Maylia’s case, only one juvenile in Wisconsin had been charged in criminal court with drug-induced homicide — in that instance, the drug was heroin. Once the district attorney in Brown County charged Maylia, though, prosecutors across the state began to do the same. In Fond du Lac, after an 18-year-old overdosed on fentanyl, the district attorney brought homicide charges against three boys under 18, all in the adult system. (Two pleaded no contest, and the third is trying to raise money for a lawyer to represent him at trial.) In Rock County, south of Madison, a 15-year-old was charged in criminal court. He admitted to a detective that he delivered two percs to a boy who later died from fentanyl intoxication. The detective showed up at his house after a school police officer noticed him crying. “It’s all my fucking — it’s all my fault,” he told the officer. “I wish I would have never done that.” He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 19 months in prison.
It’s impossible to know how many teens in the country are being charged with drug-induced homicide. There is no national database, many states do not aggregate cases, and when prosecutors file in juvenile court, the records are sealed. As a result, there’s been almost no scrutiny of how these laws are used against kids, said Katie McCreedy, a Northeastern University doctoral researcher who studies these charges. “How can young people in media stories be simultaneously assumed to know nothing about how deadly the drugs are and also held accountable for homicide?”
Both drug-induced homicide charges and transfer laws have been presented as tools to deter crime, but there’s no clear evidence that either work. In fact, many scholars argue that drug-induced homicide prosecutions may lead to more overdose deaths, as they can reduce the chances that a witness will call 911. Most criminologists agree that charging and sentencing juveniles as adults has not been shown to reduce recidivism. A series of large-scale studies found that minors prosecuted in criminal court are more likely to be rearrested than similar offenders in the juvenile system; also, Black kids are disproportionately charged in criminal court. As adolescents continue to sell fentanyl, police and prosecutors are faced with the choice of whether to consider minors as the Supreme Court has cast them — kids who can’t compute consequences the way adults can — or as killers, subject to adult sentences.
States and counties play a major role in this calculation. In recent years, as pharmaceutical money from opioid settlements has been distributed, they have been charged with investing in evidence-based solutions. According to public records, Wisconsin has earmarked only a tiny percentage of funding for treating minors. Brown County has funneled most of its spending to the sheriff’s office. In addition to paying for fentanyl test strips and Narcan, a nasal spray that delivers an overdose-reversal drug, the county decided to hire two “overdose investigators” for the drug task force. Their mandate is to pursue all fatal overdoses as homicides.
In May of 2024, Maylia pled no contest to first-degree reckless homicide. She was convinced she’d lose her appeal to send the case to the juvenile system, and she was ready to stop fighting. She was also impatient to get to a facility where she could spend time outside. It had been more than a year.
Two months later, Maylia was driven to the courtroom for sentencing. Carrie had been unable to sleep for days. Her best guess was that she was panicked that the case was ending. At least there was purpose in showing up to each hearing. It was a way of keeping Jack alive.
In court, Lemkuil, the prosecutor, kept returning to what Maylia ought to have known. “Maylia had a crystal ball of what could happen to her if she delivered drugs just like her sister did,” she said. She asked the judge for 10 years of initial confinement, followed by 10 years of extended supervision. Fritz referred to Miller v. Alabama. The judge, seemingly unaware of the case, asked her to repeat the name. She explained how the court’s language reminded her of Maylia, who had an underdeveloped sense of responsibility and received almost no parenting. Fritz asked the judge for extended probation or a maximum sentence of five years of confinement.
For the first time in the 19-month-long case, Maylia spoke in court. In jail, her friends had coached her to appear remorseful but not to cry, because no one likes self-pity. Within seconds, she couldn’t stop herself. Sitting with her hands shackled in her lap, she choked on her words. Fritz held Maylia’s written testimony close to her face so she could read. She wasn’t asking for sympathy, she said, “because I know I’m not the one who deserves it. I am speaking today to assure you that I will do everything and anything to change.” She added, “I understand the seriousness of what I have done, and I understand that there will be consequences for my actions, and I will accept those.”
At the start of the investigation, Carrie wanted retribution, and she thought she knew what justice meant. She wasn’t so sure anymore. When she addressed the court, she talked about Jack, how loyal and opinionated he was, how she had dedicated her life to him, and how that life was now meaningless, devoid of a future. She called out the drug task force for continuing to allow Maylia to deal when investigators knew she was selling fentanyl. Ronsman, who was watching from the gallery, raised his eyebrows. He understood the impulse to play Monday morning quarterback but, he thought, he wouldn’t have done anything differently given what he knew at the time. Carrie continued: “I do believe that you, Maylia, are responsible for Jack’s death.” At the front of the courtroom, she forced herself to look at Maylia. “However, I also believe that you are deserving of forgiveness. I do forgive you, Maylia.”
The judge said that considering how much Maylia was selling, she was bound to kill at some point. He was disturbed by the photos of money on her phone. “In one of them, it’s almost like someone is bathing in the cash,” he said. Yes, she was young, but he needed to keep in mind “the substantial negative impact of drug trafficking on the community.” Young users in particular, he added, “don’t really have any idea what they’re doing or what they’re getting into when they start using.” He sentenced Maylia to 10 years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision.
That evening, Carrie leaned into the corner of her living room couch next to Ryan, facing the door to Jack’s bedroom, which remained almost exactly as he had left it. She had been hoping for some epiphany, for a grand finale, but there was none. She was struck by Maylia’s voice — she sounded like a little kid, not like the girl in the flashy photos she’d posted on social media. During the hearing, Carrie had watched Maylia’s mom on the opposite side of the gallery. She kept tossing her headband in the air, spitting loudly into napkins and walking up and down the aisle in a blue suit, fur-lined snow boots and a hard hat on an 83-degree day.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Carrie said to Ryan, holding her face in her hand.
“A homicide case?”
“Well, that, of course, but I’ve never been exposed to that, I guess, that lifestyle. A child who grew up in a drug-trafficking home.”
Ryan didn’t see a reason to wish for a shorter sentence. Maylia would just be released back into the same circumstances. “This is where the problem was in the first place,” he said.
“But it’s what she knows, you know?” Carrie replied. All kids want to come home. “Look at Jack.”
She could trace the progression of her grief through the hearings in the case. How the anger had overwhelmed her at first, how she’d blamed herself for not doing more, how she had stopped wanting to live, how she had lost her trust in the police. Now she noticed a new sensation. She felt strangely protective of Maylia, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. How could CPS ignore what was happening in that home? She kept picturing Maylia’s limp face in the brief moment when they had looked at each other during the hearing.
“Maybe this is part of it,” she said. “I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn’t have a mother. So, it’s like, I’m childless, she’s motherless, and we’re in this situation together, but against each other.”
Credit:
Photo by Akilah Townsend for ProPublica. Photo illustration by ProPublica and Han Cao.