THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 35
her jurisdiction and identify gaps in the
system. She told me, “I brought law en-
forcement into the room. I brought pub-
lic health into the room. I brought treat-
ment centers into the room. I brought
the public defender into the room.” The
reforms led to important improvements,
including the increased use of Narcan,
an injection or nasal spray that can im-
mediately reverse a heroin overdose.
Yet Franklin County’s problem kept
growing. By April 27, 2015, the day that
Jamie and Courtney met in the Walmart
parking lot, Ortiz’s office had already
handled a hundred and twelve opioid
overdoses that year. Users were overdos-
ing at home and in public; two people
had drowned (one in a bathtub, the other
in a garden pond). A man had over-
dosed behind the wheel of his Honda
Civic while parked outside a Pier 1.
One of Ortiz’s close advisers on the
review board was Rick Minerd, the chief
deputy of the Special Investigations Unit
at the sheriff ’s office. Minerd, who con-
siders himself “the least coppy cop you’ll
ever meet,” has an M.B.A., and prefers
innovative problem-solving to car chases.
Ortiz’s review board inspired him to
find his own creative angle on the over-
dose epidemic.
Traditionally, cops have viewed drug
users as criminals, and arrested them;
the opioid crisis convinced them that
drug addiction could happen to any-
one, including their own family and
friends. Minerd was among those who
realized that law enforcement needed
to play an aggressive role in outreach
and treatment.
Congress had directed the Depart-
ment of Justice and the White House
Office of National Drug Control Pol-
icy to convene a National Heroin Task
Force, which ultimately urged “robust
criminal enforcement” along with in-
creased access to treatment and recov-
ery services. Opioid task forces multi-
plied as federal funding became avail-
able—the U.S. government is spending
billions of dollars on the epidemic. In
2017 and 2018 combined, federal opi-
oid-related programs allocated more
than three hundred million dollars to
Ohio alone; the Justice Department’s
contributions made a particularly dra-
matic jump, from six million dollars in
2017 to twenty million in 2018.
In Franklin County, Minerd created
a task force called hope, for Heroin
Overdose Prevention and Education.
He assigned two of his top narcotics de-
tectives to work with treatment special-
ists and provide overdose survivors with
access to help. These efforts immedi-
ately began saving lives. HOPE detectives
are on twenty-four-hour call to drive
users to treatment, and they routinely
follow up with survivors, urging them
to take advantage of free health-care op-
tions. As the Northeastern law lab notes,
“Numerous cost-benefit analyses have
found that treatment outperforms pu-
nitive measures; it reduces demand.”
Another directive of the task force
was to treat unintentional fatal overdoses
as homicides, with the goal of arresting
dealers “capitalizing on people’s addic-
tion.” When Courtney Penix died, the
task force was looking for a “test case.”A
round the time Courtney gradu-
ated from high school, an ex-boy-
friend texted her parents, Phil and Susan,
to say that she had a drug problem. The
Penixes had suspected as much. Pain
pills and cash often disappeared from
their home, along with items that could
be hawked, like the family’s PlaySta-
tion. The cutlery drawer held a dimin-
ishing number of spoons. By the time
the Penixes realized the seriousness of
Courtney’s addiction, she was eighteen
and beyond their legal control. She left
rehab early twice. The problem grew so
severe that Phil told her, “Your mother
and I have already prepared ourselves
for your death.”
After Courtney met Jamie in the
Walmart parking lot, she drove across
the road, to a Meijer gas station, and
entered the rest room. She remained
there for more than an hour, with the
door locked. A corporate-security man-
ager eventually forced the door open
and found Courtney lying unconscious,
alongside a used syringe.
A police officer tried to revive her until
paramedics arrived; his partner searched
Courtney’s belongings and found a black-
rock substance, another syringe, a shoe-
lace, two singed spoons, a lighter, the mi-
graine medication Sumatriptan, and
dozens of Suboxone wrappers. Paramed-
ics administered three doses of Narcan,
but, at 7:49 p.m., at a Columbus hospi-
tal, Courtney was pronounced dead.
Homicide detectives from the Co-lumbus Division of Police classified
the case as “not a crime.” Later, when
Ortiz finalized Courtney’s autopsy, she
categorized her death as an accidental
overdose.
The night Courtney died, her parents
went through her phone, and found mul-
tiple text threads mentioning drugs. Phil
told me that he called one of the num-
bers and “went on a rant” to the man
who answered, saying, “If I ever find out
who you are, I will make things happen.”
Three of Courtney’s uncles, on her
mother’s side, the Plancks, were police
officers. One of them, Brent Planck, a
longtime narcotics officer in Columbus,
decided to independently investigate
Courtney’s death. He told me, “I wanted
to find out who was responsible, other
than my niece—obviously she’s respon-
sible. But who’s selling this shit?”
Courtney’s texts provided the name
Jamie and an exchange about Walmart.
Planck acquired security-camera foot-
age from both Walmart and Meijer. The
Meijer footage showed Courtney arriv-
ing at the gas station at around 5:40 p.m.,
twenty minutes after seeing Jamie, in
dark leggings and a white-and-gray
windbreaker, her sunglasses on top of
her head. The Walmart footage showed
a woman getting out of a Chevy Co-
balt and meeting Courtney at her car.
Columbus detectives still did not
see a case. But Planck heard that the
sheriff ’s office was starting an overdose-
homicide task force, and handed off his
information.W
hen a loved one overdoses, it may
be easier for family and friends
to think of her as prey than to accept the
more complex reality of addiction. And
for detectives—who, in conventional ho-
micide cases, often work tirelessly to pro-
vide “closure” to grieving families—it can
be motivating to reimagine a tragic ac-
cident as a crime scene, with a victim
and a perpetrator. Dennis Cauchon, the
president of Harm Reduction Ohio, a
nonprofit that opposes overdose-homi-
cide laws, recalls hearing a prosecutor
say at a conference, “When parents ask
us to do something, it’s hard to say no.”
When Ron O’Brien, the chief pro-
secutor in Franklin County, first heard
about the hope task force, he needed
to be convinced of the merits of pursu-
ing overdoses as homicides. He viewed