GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WZZM) - A Grand Rapids heroin dealer who dragged an unconscious woman outside after she overdosed on fentanyl last November and then tried to hide drugs as police arrived was sentenced Monday to 22 ½ years in prison.
Senecca Freeman, 35, appeared in U.S. District Court for sentencing on a related charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Federal prosecutors say Freeman used the stolen handgun to "protect and further his drug operation.''
He pleaded guilty to the offense in August. In exchange for his plea, several other charges, including heroin trafficking, were dismissed.
The U.S. Attorney's Office sought a longer term of imprisonment based on Freeman's criminal background, which includes four drug convictions. Freeman has more than two dozen arrests in Grand Rapids dating back to 1999 for offenses ranging from hindering an officer to assault and battery.
"In the course of his drug dealing business, defendant provided fentanyl to a customer who overdosed and died,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean M. Lewis wrote in a sentencing memorandum. "The defendant was not deterred by his many prior convictions and lesser sentences.''
Freeman was arrested in November, 2014 after a bus driver saw him dragging an unresponsive woman to the sidewalk outside his home on Marshall Avenue SE. The woman, Heather Fieseler, died from an overdose of fentanyl, which addicts use in conjunction with heroin or as a heroin substitute.
The patch form of fentanyl was developed more than 20 years ago and prescribed to treat chronic pain in patients suffering from cancer.
Freeman's drug customers believed they were buying heroin, but it was actually fentanyl, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. A search of his home turned up more than 60 bags of fentanyl and a stolen handgun in the attic.
"The loss of my sister is beyond words,'' Fieseler's sister, Amy Misner, wrote U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Jonker in a victim impact statement. "Our family is forever broken.''
The family could not afford to bring her body back to Missouri so they had her cremated, Misner wrote. "Her children will never get to see their mother again. I do not feel like she deserved to die the way she did.''
In addition to prison, Jonker ordered that Freeman serve five years on supervised release once he gets out of prison and pay a $2,500 fine.
Defense attorney John J. Frawley asked for a term of between 15 ½ and 19 ½ years, noting that Freeman had a troubled childhood.
He was removed from his mother's home in 1987 as a result of child abuse and placed in foster care in Grand Rapids, Frawley wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Fieseler is one of 67 people who died in Kent County last year from a drug overdose. About 38 percent of the overdose deaths were due to heroin or fentanyl, according to numbers from the Kent County Medical Examiner's Office.
Heroin laced with fentanyl can be up to 100 times more powerful than morphine and between 30 and 50 times more powerful than heroin.
Law enforcement seizures of illegal drugs containing fentanyl more than tripled between 2013 and 2014, with more than 3,300 submissions made to state and local police laboratories for analysis last year. The Drug Enforcement Administration in earlier this year issued a public safety alert due to the spike in overdoses related to fentanyl, a highly-addictive painkiller.
