A 27-year-old guy from Columbus died of an overdose of Fentanyl. A woman from Webb City has been officially charged in this case.
Patrick Stephens was found dead in his Columbus home in the morning of July 2, 2024. An autopsy showed that he had been heavily high on fentanyl before he died.
The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office and the Columbus Police Department have been looking into what happened before Stephens died ever since.
Because of that probe, evidence was found that led Sheriff’s Detectives to want to charge Mikaela Marie Sellars, who is 22 years old, with a crime.
Thursday in Cherokee County District Court, the office of Cherokee County Attorney Kurt Benecke charged two people with felonies: distribution of a controlled substance that caused death and distribution of a controlled drug while using a communication device.
It is said that Sellars set up a meeting with Stephens for July 1, 2024, at a grocery store in the middle of nowhere in Cherokee County. There, he sold Stephens Fentanyl, which killed him the next morning.
Sellars has been in the Cherokee County Jail since August 29, 2024, on separate charges of aggravated child endangerment, abuse of a child, possession of drug paraphernalia, and violating the rules of her probation. The new formal complaint was served on her Thursday afternoon.