It's in your hands, right,
dude? It's it's sown into his underwear,
OK? While someone's underwear
isn't necessarily a place you
expect to find drugs, it's not a
surprise that bust happened on I-75.
Law enforcement has known for years
that this highway is a cross
country drug trafficking pipeline.
So from Michigan all the way down to Florida,
and you've probably guessed the
F word that's about to come up,
the amount of fentanyl drastically
within the past few years has
we found that I-75 runs through the
three places in Florida
with the most fentanyl deaths,
and two of them are right
here in the Tampa Bay area.
It literally makes me sick
to my stomach. Let's see what's brewing.
Hey, I'm Jenna Bourne, and I'm an
investigative reporter at 10 Tampa Bay.
If you're new here, welcome to
our Caffeine Fuel deep dive
into issues that matter to you.
Why are we meeting at a skate park?
We're meeting at a skate park because
that's the one thing I think Nick
loved to do almost more than anything.
He loved to be outdoors.
He'd much rather be outdoors than inside.
The best cat in the world, Charlie.
There still is a stigma out there,
especially with drug addicts.
Some people assume that
they're from broken homes,
bad families, bad upbringing.
There's a lot of addiction out there
that they come from good homes.
We live in a good neighborhood
and that doesn't matter.
I believe Nick had some mental
health issues and he for me,
he was trying to self medicate. In
2019, Kathy Foucher found her son
Nick Malomatis dead in her home.
He was holding a needle
when I got the coroner's report,
the autopsy report, it said
accidental overdose due to fentanyl.
It's hard as a parent because you never
think you're going to outlive your kids.
So this is where fentanyl winds up,
but how does it get here?
Over the past year, our 10
Investigates team has been looking
into different ways fentanyl gets
into our country and our communities.
10 Investigates.
Jennifer Titus went to the US,
Mexico border last year and met
with Customs and Border Protection
officers to see these machines.
They're kind of like what your
bag goes through at the airport.
But for trucks,
we need something that can penetrate
the steel so we can look inside.
Refrigerated frozen commodities is
another one. So this high energy, we
can actually see what's inside.
And we told you in March,
the White House's Office of National
Drug Control Policy identified
the US Mail in 2019 as the most
common distribution medium for
fentanyl entering the US and moving
domestically to its end users.
The chemicals are derived from
China shipped into Mexico,
where the laboratories are then producing.
What we see is straight fentanyl
powder and or a lot of what we're
starting to see are pressed pills.
We see them come from areas along
the border because it's easily
brought into the United States,
from across the US border and then
shipped throughout the United States.
It's also trafficked through
literal traffic on I-75 I
75. It's a main conduit through six states.
So from Michigan all the way down to Florida,
from Detroit through Cincinnati,
Knoxville, Atlanta,
Tampa and ending in Fort Lauderdale.
It's long been known to law enforcement
as a pipeline for drug trafficking.
Officers used to find a lot of heroin.
Now fentanyl flows through it. It's
kind of like all we have right now
is a Band-Aid and we need, like,
a tourniquet to to put on this problem.
We need to, like, cut it off.
We need to stop the flow.
I asked some friends who report in areas
along I-75 to tell you what it's like.
I'm Grace Kane with WBIR in Knoxville,
where authorities say the
drug problem is getting worse.
They credit part of that to East Tennessee
Central location about halfway on
I-75 with a direct route to Detroit.
We knew here in Knoxville,
law enforcement knew that a
large portion of our drugs were
coming from that Detroit area. For the past
eight months, law enforcement there
have been targeting people from
Detroit who they say are using I-75 to
traffic drugs into the Knoxville area.
They're calling it the 313 Initiative.
That's the area code for Detroit.
Few people know it or
even believe it, but Mexican
cartels are active
here in northern Ohio and
southern Michigan. Drug seizures
on I-75 in Ohio nowhere
has more than Wood County.
Although some state agencies like
Ohio State Highway Patrol track
their fentanyl busts along I-75,
Florida Highway Patrol does not.
FHP doesn't even track how much
fentanyl they bust across the state.
Their drug data lumps fentanyl
into the category called Other.
So it's hard to say exactly how
much fentanyl Florida troopers are
finding along I-75 or anywhere else.
But what we do know
is that more people are dying in Florida
from fentanyl than any other drug.
In the first six months of 2022,
two of the top three areas in Florida with
the most fentanyl deaths were right here
in Tampa Bay Medical Examiner District 6
That covers Pinellas and Pasco counties.
Second is District 17.
That's Broward County,
and #3 brings it back to the Bay Area.
District 13, which is Hillsborough County.
I-75 connects them all.
We went to the number one area with
the most fentanyl deaths to find
out what they're doing about it
at the Pasco Sheriff's Office.
Narcotics Canine.
Flash and his handler,
Deputy Anthony Casparitis,
are part of the highway
interdiction team known as HIT,
So his primary goal with the
Sheriff's Office is to disrupt the
flow of illegal narcotics. What
makes I-75 in particular, so
appealing to drug traffickers? Just
the dropoff points you get, I mean,
where it takes you through our state, he
says. Hit finds fentanyl.
So often they've stopped letting
their canines go into a car.
After they've sniffed and alerted,
they're worried the dogs
will overdose. I don't
want to run the the risk of my
dog putting his nose on it.
He's my buddy. He's my buddy 24/7.
Spend more time with him
than I spend my family.
We encounter fentanyl a daily
basis every single day.
We we run into it.
Hit. Deputy James Dunn told us
he arrested people on fentanyl
charges right before this interview.
It affects everyone's lives.
Most of the crime we have within
Pasco County is because of drugs.
You have these people that use the drugs
and they have to have a way to fund,
fund their drug habit so they
go out and commit other crimes.
So it affects every single neighborhood.
Yeah. These drugs don't stay on the highway.
They wind up in our communities.
It's everywhere. It is everywhere
and in our loved ones hands. Unfortunately,
Nick was incarcerated quite a bit in jail,
so whenever a special occasion came up,
he would have somebody that was
an artist in the jail with him,
Draw Something special.
So this was part of his happy birthday mom.
He'd send me those and he had
a handwritten note with it.
A lot of people are dying,
just like Nick died because their
drug of choice was laced with
fentanyl and they didn't know it,
he still was my son,
so thank you for letting me share.
If you or a loved one is
struggling with addiction,
we have resources for you in
the video description below.
Thanks for watching what's brewing.
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and I'll see you next time.