United States Attorney Ron Parsons announced that a Rockford, Illinois, woman has been indicted with Distribution of Heroin Resulting in Death in the District of South Dakota as part of a concerted national effort by the U.S. Department of Justice, working closely with state and local law enforcement, to combat opioids by prosecuting drug dealers to hold them accountable for the deaths and serious injuries of overdose victims. Under federal law, anyone who illegally provides a controlled substance to another person who then overdoses from using that substance is subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of at least twenty years in federal prison.
Earlier this month, Stephanie Broecker, age 26, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Sioux Falls for selling the heroin that led to the death of a 30-year-old man in Miner County, South Dakota. The man, identified as K.P. in court documents, was found dead from an apparent heroin overdose at a residence in rural Miner County on November 19, 2017. Broecker was located and arrested in Illinois. She appeared before a federal magistrate judge in the Northern District of Illinois on April 10, 2018, and is currently in the custody of the U.S. Marshals awaiting transfer to South Dakota to face the federal charges. If convicted, Broecker faces a minimum of twenty years and a maximum of life in prison.
In 2016, 67 South Dakotans died of drug overdoses, more than half of which were classified as opioid poisoning. In 2017, 10 people died from opiate-related overdoses in Minnehaha County alone and it is on track to exceed that number this year. There have been at least three heroin or fentanyl overdose deaths in Sioux Falls in the past month.