© Drug Enforcement Administration / Reuters
Robinson Rojas-Rosario, 32, is being held on $100,000 bail at the Methuen police station in Massachusetts after he was found to be carrying 33 pounds worth of China White fentanyl. Rojas-Rosario has pleaded not guilty to major drug trafficking charges, while Methuen police celebrated the arrest.
Police received a call Tuesday morning from a witness who claimed to have seen Rojas-Rosario step out of a taxi and retrieve a gun from his duffel bag, hide it on his person and then get back in the cab. When police arrested him, they did not find the gun, but they did find $1.2 million worth of fentanyl, an extremely potent painkiller.
"Officers opened the bag and found what appeared to be 15 packages, they observed the packages were suspected fentanyl, marked 'China White,'" Methuen Police Lt. Michael Pappalardo told the Boston Herald.
"Our streets are safer now," Mayor Stephen Zanni said in the press statement. "Any effort we can make in fighting the opioid epidemic is progress, but removing such a large amount of this deadly substance from our streets is a huge success."
The bust is one of the biggest in Methuen, a city with a population of about 47,255 people.
"It's substantial," Pappalardo said. "It will definitely have an impact in the area as far as supply and demand is concerned."
The news was well received in Methuen where this past Saturday, a 10-month-old infant was hospitalized after being exposed to fentanyl in an unrelated incident. The child was first taken to Lawrence General Hospital where she had to be revived twice before being airlifted to Tufts Medical Center in Boston, WCVB reported.
"The opioid epidemic knows no boundaries," Mayor Stephen Zanni said in a statement.
Reader Comments
system has a natural painkiller, endorphin. If you start feeling pain above normal levels , then something isn't functioning well in your system. Try to find what's wrong. Stop taking painkillers because thus you cure the symptom without knowing what the cause is. When I had my gall bladder
removed I felt excruciating pain at 2:30 am in my guts at 2 different spots and of course I called 911.
It was out of the ordinary. After being admitted to the emergency room for the standard tests, I was taken to an ultrasound machine room. It didn't take more than a few minutes for a female physician to announce to me
that I had stones in my gall bladder like "Hey, it happens everyday.". Sure it does. 11 days in the hospital , 3.5 hours in surgery , a grand, 24 hours to straighten up after I returned home, a simple guideline not to eat fatty foods and a hernia to remind me of how stupid I was to eat so much for so long.
The other day my brother had a tooth removed. Practical advice from the part of the doctor : Forget painkillers in teeth, none of them works, if it does there's something very wrong with the substance. So he told him to use one of those cold packs or anything icy on the external surface of the cheek. I, in a similar case took like an idiot 2 grams, within 48 hours, of a very powerful painkiller without informing
my dentist that I suffer from hypertension and as a result I went through a hypertension shock.
There was sweat coming out from underneath my feet ! Lovely experience. Btw , blood pressure is adjusted by a regulator on the lower right part of your abdomen. Years of stress and drinking too much coffee ruined it.
The whole medical system sucks . With the exception of surgeons who have to cut you open , all the rest...
Instead of being taught all that BS at school , the least our teachers could do is teach us the basics in medicine.