Why Heroin Addicts Are Being Charged With Murder

Drug-induced homicide laws punish people who provide or administer drugs that lead to overdoses — which often means locking up low-level opioid users for life

By Jamie Peck

When 24-year-old Jarret McCasland left the home of his girlfriend, Flavia “Cathy” Cardenas, 19, in the early morning hours of July 26th, 2013, he had no reason to think anything was really out of the ordinary.

The pair, who habitually used drugs together in their town outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had spent the night ingesting a variety of substances at the home of Cardenas’ friend, Christina Garman. (Garman has said McCasland injected Cardenas with both heroin and cocaine; McCasland only admits to cocaine.) After leaving the friend’s house, as he later said, McCasland stopped to meet Cardenas’s drug dealer, “T,” who fronted her more heroin on credit. The couple then went back to the house Cardenas lived in with her mother Nancy Landa, where, as Landa later testified, the two quarreled before growing quiet. Jarret said in his statement to police that he was going to inject Cardenas with heroin in her room, but Cardenas got impatient and ended up injecting herself. He went home around 2 a.m. Around the time Jarret left, Landa spoke with her daughter, agreeing they’d talk in the morning. Landa checked on her once between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. and found her snoring, which she said was a normal occurrence.

Around 9:30 or 10 a.m — reports differ — Cardenas’s mother found her unresponsive. Landa called a neighbor, Joaquin Jule, who came over and called 911, and also performed CPR. Cardenas was rushed to the hospital. At 11:33 a.m., Cardenas was pronounced dead.

No one told McCasland any of this. He’d never had a good relationship with Landa, and Garman — who would later testify against him — did not contact him. When his calls and texts to Cardenas went un-returned, McCasland thought either Landa had sent her to live with her father, as she’d threatened to do, or that she’d gotten back with her ex-boyfriend. Jarret saw a memorial post about Cardenas on social media, but thought it might just be a terrible joke. It was not until a full two weeks later, when the police…

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