Police officers have arrested a Riverside County man suspected of fatally dosing his then 17-year-old girlfriend with fentanyl, taking them into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border two years after her death.
Michael Garcia, 23, is accused of giving the teen the highly potent drug before she was found unconscious on the morning of Aug. 21, 2022, according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Officers found her in a bedroom after arriving at a home in the 15000 block of Via Quedo in Desert Hot Springs just before 9 a.m.
Riverside County Sheriff’s Department
Detectives identified Garcia as the suspect after a months-long investigation, leading to a warrant for his arrest. The U.S. Marshals Service and local law enforcement agencies helped track him down and arrest him after investigators learned he may have fled to Mexico, sheriff’s officials said.
On Monday, Cathedral City police arrested him in El Centro, about 10 miles north of the border, before booking him into the John Benoit Detention Center in Indio on $75,000 bail, according to county jail records. Sheriff’s Department investigators said he is being held on suspicion of unlawfully furnishing a controlled substance to a minor and misdemeanor child abuse.
According to the sheriff, the Riverside County Prosecutor’s Office has filed criminal charges against Garcia.
In recent years, District Attorney Mike Hestrin was one of the first county prosecutors in Southern California to file criminal charges against those accused of supplying fentanyl in connection with deaths. It’s a step a growing number of DAs in the region take, with prosecutors in Ventura and Los Angeles counties this year, for the first time, murder charges were filed in fatal fentanyl cases.
Fentanyl has been blamed for a recent surge in U.S. drug deaths, with the number of Americans dying from it annually nearly doubling from 40,000 to nearly 80,000 between 2019 and 2022, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It is described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency as being about 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact Sgt. Jim Peters at 951-486-6700 or Detective Dan Shaffer at 951-955-1700.
