Another Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD student overdoses on fentanyl

CARROLLTON, Texas - The DEA says the recent arrests of suspected drug dealers in Carrollton are a step in the right direction, but there's still a long fight ahead.

Even as they announced a fourth arrest last week, another high school student overdosed on campus.

Dallas DEA Special Agent in Charge Eduardo Chavez says the fentanyl arrests are making an impact in taking down criminal organizations that have a grip in North Texas. 

"It’s a challenge. I was with the chief this morning. We are swinging," he said. "We are making progress, but it’s always hard."

On the same day federal authorities announced a fourth arrest related to deadly drug sales in Carrollton last Friday, a student at RL Turner High School became unresponsive after ingesting a pill, requiring a dose of a lifesaving drug called Narcan. That student did survive.

Every campus in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD now has access to Narcan following three overdose deaths of middle and high school students. 

"Narcan is one of those things that will save a life if its available and you have to have it readily available to do that," Chavez said.  "

In the past year, Chavez says authorities have seized over 11 million deadly doses of fentanyl in North Texas mostly in the form of blue pills.

In Carrollton, some of the people selling those pills are teenagers who are recruited by adults who are providing the drugs.

"We continue to work with the Carrollton Police Department just on a lot of the tentacles," Chavez said. "You don’t know how widespread a particular organization has their grips on an area or a city for that matter."

Last month, federal authorities arrested 22-year-old Jason Villanueva, 21-year-old Luis Navarrete and 29-year-old Magaly Cano in connection to a series of overdoses at RL Turner High School and two middle schools.

READ MORE: 22-year-old arrested, considered 'main source' of fentanyl that killed 3 Carrollton teens, feds say

Last week, authorities arrested 20-year-old Donavan Andrews accusing him of capitalizing off those previous arrests. They say his drugs caused at least two overdoses at Hebron High School also in Carrollton.

Authorities say Andrews advertised on social media, and victims paid him with Cash App.

"It’s not necessarily one social media application," Chavez said. "A lot of these platforms offer some sort of anonymity for disappearing messages. So that makes it more challenging."

For now, Chavez says the strategy for taking down these drug dealers is to keep whittling away one at a time. He says it’s a slow process but one that can hopefully lead to bigger results.

"It tends to be a bit of a freelance market. Once we start connecting the dots, you tend to see common threads, a common individual at the top organizing it," he said. "It is not a microwave dinner where we will have answers in 30 seconds or less. It’s something like the slow cooker process to identify some other individuals and keep following it along."

The Carrollton-Faremers Branch ISD superintendent met with the family of one of the students who died from using fentanyl-laced pills. In a statement, the district said they are continuing to find strategies to fight the problem.