At Tuesday’s meeting of the Rotary Club of Mount Airy Lenise Lynch introduced Detective Jake Hiatt and Chief Deputy Larry Lowe to the Rotarians. Hiatt was there to inform on the efforts of the Surry County Sheriff’s office at combatting substance abuse and specifically his new role into investigations of deaths from drug overdose.
Lynch said the Rotary joined with the sheriff’s office and the county’s office of substance abuse recovery last year in what she called a great partnership. “We are hopefully on our way to becoming part of the solution through promoting awareness, enhancing understanding, and changing perceptions of substance abuse in Surry County through public advocacy.”
New law holds sharp teeth
Detective Hiatt began with a simple explanation of a North Carolina law that went onto the books in 2019. What is commonly referred to as the death by distribution act, “Is a provision that holds narcotics dealers accountable,” he said and was interrupted by a spontaneous and vigorous applause break from the Rotary members.
Hiatt said, “If we are investigation an overdose now, we can charge the dealer with a Class C felony – death by distribution. With a previous history of narcotics distribution that charge can be upped to a Class B-2 felony.”
For context on classes of felonious conduct, he said second-degree rape or first-degree kidnapping would be found in Class C and yield a sentence of up to 231 months. Class B-2 felonies include conspiracy to commit any Class A felony or second-degree murder and may carry a sentence from 93 – 293 months. “Potentially if these dealers have history and the right factors and stars align, we can put them in prison for 30 years,” Hiatt said.
Modern tech leave breadcrumbs
When a call comes in regarding an overdose, investigators will arrive to secure the scene and any evidence available that may prove an overdose has occurred. Hiatt said, “Most of the time it is pretty obvious for different reasons.”
“One thing we always look for right away to secure is a cell phone. It’s no secret cell phone is a lifeline to most people and there is no telling what you might find on it. Most of the time that is where we get our information.”
He said with the ubiquitous use of smart phones means users are leaving a data trail throughout social media that may help investigators later and be much more useful that call or text records. Phones have contacts, calendars, texts, photos, geo tracking information, voicemails, and even banking information available to law enforcement just behind a password.
“If we find a phone on scene and we can determine pretty quickly they have social media account we’ll do a preservation order before we do anything else just to get that stuff locked in.” He said social media companies are very responsive to court orders and a preservation order will freeze the account until a warrant is secured for the data.
“We have encountered situations where friends of the victim, or even in one case it was the person we charged for death by distribution, were going back and unsending messages where they had talked about exchanging money for narcotics. Had we not done the preservation order when we did there may have been even more information gone.”
Hiatt has been in this role for over month after more than ten years in law enforcement with both Elkin and Mount Airy Police before joining Sheriff Hiatt. His is not a one-person outfit and it requires help across the sheriffs’s office and interdepartmental assistance to find suspects and witnesses who may have false names, addressed, and phone numbers forever in flux.
Tactics are changing to meet the evolving nature of technology and communication. “Speaking of social media, people use these in messages to each other, and Facebook is probably the biggest and it’s even better for us than regular text messages,” Hiatt said of the wealth of data a warrant could yield from social media.
So much so it can overwhelm investigators, so they have learned to be more precise in their searches. An overdose death was not cause by drugs bought six months ago, Hiatt said, so investigators probably would not need to look back that far to find what they need to chase a suspect.
Thanks to Mark Willis and the county’s office of substance abuse management, Hiatt and the rest of the SCSO have access to Cellebrite which allows for local analysis of cell phones without assistance from the state lab. If there is no password, the software will collect and dump all data from the phone for law enforcement.
Should a cell phone be in a damaged state, cannot be turned on, or a password cannot be beaten the phone will be sent to the SBI lab in Greensboro. There the State Bureau of Investigation has access to a program that “runs numbers all day long” to get around passwords.
True numbers obscured
Hiatt dug through the data and reported that since last August, 221 calls came into the county’s communications center reporting an overdose of some sort. Of those calls, 138 needed law enforcement response to secure the scene for first responders or conduct further investigation. These numbers may be low, he said, due to people now addressing overdoses on their own who may never call 911 or seek treatment.
Wendy Odum of Birches Foundation agrees with his assessment and this week submitted her annual report to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services tracking all manner of data from overdoses to Narcan kits distributed.
“Concrete data is usually considered to be incidents that have been reported to law enforcement, EMS, the hospital. There’s a gap in those numbers that are gathered by direct reports from law enforcement and EMS, compared to the reported incidents that we as harm reduction practitioners in direct community health have access to.”
Odum said that between June 2020 through July 2021, Birches Foundation reported 502 overdoses in Surry County. “The great majority of the overdoses received Narcan and were resolved by someone in the home or community setting. Birches Foundation provided 3,250 Narcan kits during that same year.”
Since the death by distribution act was signed in 2019 Surry County has investigated 37 deaths from overdose, 16 of those coming in the last year. Three investigations have yielded charges under the new law and Det. Hiatt said all are still pending so he could not offer any more insight.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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