MURRIETA — A young man who joined a cohort in supplying a lethal dose of fentanyl to a 16-year-old French Valley girl pleaded guilty Friday to voluntary manslaughter and was immediately sentenced to four years in state prison.
Jeremiah David Carlton, 22, of Canyon Lake admitted the felony offense under a plea agreement with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. In exchange for his admission, prosecutors dropped a second-degree murder charge.
During a pretrial hearing at the Southwest Justice Center in Murrieta Friday, Superior Court Judge John Monterosso certified the terms of the plea deal and imposed the sentence stipulated by the prosecution and defense.
Carlton provided the synthetic opioid to the teenager, identified in court documents only as “J.G,” in 2021.
His co-defendant, 21-year-old Raymond Gene Tyrrell of French Valley, who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty in July to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in state prison.
However, due to the amount of time he’d already spent in jail, awaiting disposition of the case, along with other sentencing credits, Judge Stephen Gallon converted his prison term to what’s called a “paper commitment,” enabling Tyrrell to instantly go on parole.
Sheriff’s Sgt. Rick Espinoza said Carlton and Tyrrell obtained the drugs that led to the death of J.G. on the night of Feb. 24, 2021, at a residence in the 35000 block of Sugar Maple Street, near Leon Road.
Espinoza said deputies were called to the location to investigate two possible fentanyl poisonings and discovered the girl and a man, whose name was not released, comatose. Both were taken to a regional trauma center, where the man was revived but the girl succumbed to the toxic ingestion.
“Detectives conducted an investigation and developed information that this was possibly a homicide,” the sergeant said, declining to elaborate on the circumstances.
Tyrrell was summoned to the Southwest Sheriff’s Station in Murrieta a day later and interviewed by detectives, after which he was taken into custody. Carlton was served an arrest warrant and taken into custody at his residence.
Neither defendant had documented prior felony convictions.
Since February 2021, the District Attorney’s Office has charged over 30 people countywide in connection with fentanyl poisonings.
Last November, prosecutors closed the books on the county’s first fentanyl murder case to go before a jury, culminating in the conviction of 34- year-old Vicente David Romero, who was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the 2020 death of a Temecula woman. District Attorney Mike Hestrin said it was the first fentanyl murder conviction in the state.
According to public health statistics, there were 550 known fentanyl-related fatalities countywide in 2023, a 9% increase from 2022, when there were 503.
Fentanyl is manufactured in overseas labs, principally in China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which says the drug is smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border by cartels.
Fentanyl is 80-100 times more potent than morphine and can be mixed into any number of street narcotics and prescription drugs, without a user knowing what he or she is consuming. Ingestion of only two milligrams can be fatal.
