-Hello?
-Yes, this is 911. Okay, what is going on there?
-There's one, two, three, four, five people.
-Okay, do you know what they took?
-It looks like cocaine on the shelf.
-Okay, okay.
-I get called for every homicide in my jurisdiction.
But this call was different.
-Breaking tonight -- five people dead,
a woman and an infant pulled out alive.
Whatever happened inside that Commerce City apartment
is beyond words, beyond explanation.
-It really is.
-My memory is that I got there
shortly after 8:00.
It was pitch-black out.
And yet, the apartment complex
was lit up by law enforcement lights.
It was a major crime scene.
-I stood in the doorway of that apartment,
and to see these people just lying on the ground,
it almost was like somebody just took their soul.
And they literally just collapsed.
It looked to us, as the investigators,
like they thought they were gonna be using cocaine.
-Seeing the DEA agent point the TruNarc at the powder
and then showing me what it came up as,
and it just said "fentanyl."
-They thought they were all gonna be using powder cocaine.
We're not suggesting that was okay,
but it's certainly things that we understand that people do.
But they all paid the price with their life.
[wind chime ringing]
-I actually always warned all -- all my friends.
I hated -- I hated drugs.
So what gets me so upset is, you know, I told them.
And it just makes me sad that it was my sister.
Sam was Karina's boyfriend.
Jen and Steph, they were our friends.
And Cora was Sam's sister.
And Berto was Cora's husband.
I mean, it wasn't, like, a party.
It wasn't anything crazy.
It was just a few friends hanging out.
-I didn't know what to think at first.
I thought somebody killed them.
You know, I thought -- Well, somebody did kill them.
But I didn't relate it to drugs at all, you know?
I just didn't know what it was.
You know, she went to dinner that night
and expected to go home and have a little fun, I guess.
It was her first real time going out since she had the baby.
-They had just decorated the baby's room,
and it was so cute.
And she worked so hard, and she had everything so perfect.
And she had her little outfits hung up from size.
She had everything -- She just had everything for that baby.
-She wasn't a druggie.
She was just having a little fun, so she thought.
You know, she didn't -- she didn't deserve to die.
None of them did.
-It was clear from the crime scene
that these five individuals
didn't know they were taking fentanyl.
And so, I wanted to immediately tell the public.
No drug is safe right now.
People who are taking drugs
and not knowing that fentanyl is laced within them are dying.
I was terrified that there was more of it out there.
And I was terrified that we were gonna have more deaths.
-It's so cheap to make this drug,
and it's so addictive.
And because of the highway systems
and just the sheer location where Denver's at,
it makes it a very easy hub for these drugs
to come into the Denver metro area
and then be distributed.
-We knew right away
that this was gonna be a really challenging case.
I have to have an identifiable suspect
that I can prove sold the drugs
that were laced with the fentanyl
that killed these five people.
-We suspected that one of the decedents
brought the drugs,
but who did that person get the drugs from?
We were able to get it down to one of three people.
But barring a confession,
we weren't able to get to the level of proof
that we needed
to get to our probable cause.
-I would hope somebody would have a conscience
and come forth and say something.
Stephanie loved the outdoors, loved sports.
She lived vicariously, like, through our child.
She was everything to us.
She dropped him off that night and told him, "I'll be back.
Mommy loves you. I'll be back."
So I got to imagine, like, in their mind,
like, how they feel just about, like, everything.
But essentially I put it to him is that she was poisoned.
My son's, like, an introvert, so he doesn't talk a whole lot.
But I can tell, like, this is wearing on him.
That light behind his eyes is gone.
Our daughter, she says things like,
"I'm so angry that Mommy's not here."
It makes me angry she says that.
Like...
[sobbing]
♪♪
-This was different.
It was different than what we have done before
in cases where someone has died from fentanyl poisoning.
And I think this is one of the first cases
that received a lot of prominence
but also helped law enforcement turn the tide
on how we're gonna respond to these deaths
and how we are going to treat them like crimes,
which then spurred the motivation
to go to our state legislature and say,
"I need better tools to attack the fentanyl problem."
-I think the laws still need to be stricter,
but before, it was not even a slap on the wrist.
I know everybody thinks that
they're taking drugs, they should know,
but it's not right.
They were poisoned. They didn't --
They didn't choose to do that.
I mean...
I think they were murdered, and somebody should pay for that.
♪♪