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Man accused of selling fake pills throughout U.S., running operation out of a garage turned “lab” in Connecticut
In a nondescript garage in Connecticut, a New Haven man manufactured hundreds of thousands of counterfeit pills containing methamphetamine, a powerful opioid and other illicit drugs that he shipped around the U.S. and gave to local dealers to sell on the streets, new federal grand jury indictments allege.
Federal law enforcement officials announced the criminal indictments against the man and six other people on Monday, calling the case one of the largest counterfeit pill busts ever in New England.
Kelldon Hinton, 45, is accused of running the operation from a rented garage he called his “lab” in East Haven, about 5 miles from downtown New Haven, using drugs and pill presses he bought from sellers in China and other countries, federal authorities said.
Officials said Hinton shipped more than 1,300 packages through the U.S. mail to people who bought the pills on the dark web from February 2023 to February 2024. He also gave pills to associates in Connecticut who sold them to their customers, the indictments allege.
The six other people who were indicted are also from Connecticut.
Hinton sold counterfeit oxycodone, Xanax and Adderall pills that contained methamphetamine and protonitazene, a synthetic opioid that is three time more powerful than fentanyl, federal officials said. The tablets also contained dimethylpentylone – a designer party drug known to be mislabeled as ecstasy – and xylazine, a tranquilizer often called “tranq.”
Hinton and four others were arrested on Sept. 5, the same day authorities with search warrants raided the East Haven garage and other locations. Officials say they seized several hundred thousand pills, two pill presses and pill manufacturing equipment. One of the pill presses can churn out 100,000 pills an hour, authorities said.
U.S. Attorney’s Office Connecticut via AP
A federal public defender for Hinton did not immediately return an email seeking comment Monday.
Federal, state and local authorities were involved in the investigation, including the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and state and local police.
“This investigation reveals the constant challenges that we in law enforcement face in battling the proliferation of synthetic opioids in America,” Connecticut U.S. Attorney Vanessa Roberts Avery said in a statement.
Fake prescription pills containing fentanyl and other powerful opioids are contributing to high numbers of overdoses across the country, said Stephen Belleau, acting special agent in charge of the DEA’s New England field division.
“DEA will aggressively pursue drug trafficking organizations and individuals who distribute this poison in order to profit and destroy people’s lives,” he said in a statement.
Authorities said they were tipped off about Hinton by an unnamed source in June 2023. Law enforcement officials said they later began searching and seizing parcels sent to and from Hinton and set up surveillance that showed him dropping off parcels at a post office. Investigators also said they ordered bogus pills from Hinton’s operation on the dark web.
In addition to Hinton, prosecutors also charged: Heshima Harris, 53 of New Haven; Emanuel Payton, 33, of New Haven; Marvin Ogman, 47, of Est Haven; Shawn Stephens. 34, of West Haven; Arnaldo Echevarria, 42, of Waterbury, and Cheryle Tyson, 64, of West Haven. Hinton, Payton and Ogman are currently detained, while Harris, Stephens, Echevarri, and Tyson are released pending trial.
Hinton has a criminal record dating to 1997 that includes convictions for assault, larceny and drug sales, federal authorities said in a search warrant application.
About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
The country’s overdose epidemic has killed more than 1 million people since 1999.
As “60 Minutes” reported Sunday, nearly all the fentanyl flooding into the U.S. is made in Mexico by two powerful drug cartels, with chemicals primarily purchased from China. And as you’re about to hear, it is frequently hidden in counterfeit pills made to look just like prescription drugs. It’s the scourge of our time. Last year more than 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl; that’s a higher death toll than U.S. military casualties in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
HUNTSVILLE — A Texas man who had waived his right to appeal his death sentence was put to death Tuesday evening for killing his 3-month-old son more than 16 years ago, one of five executions scheduled within a week’s time in the U.S.
AP
Travis Mullis, 38, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m. CDT. He was condemned for stomping to death his son Alijah in January 2008.
Mullis was the fourth inmate put to death this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. Another execution was carried out Tuesday evening in Missouri, and on Thursday, executions were scheduled to take place in Oklahoma and Alabama. South Carolina conducted an execution Friday.
Authorities said Mullis, then 21 and living in Brazoria County, drove to nearby Galveston with his son after fighting with his girlfriend. Mullis parked his car and sexually assaulted his son. After the infant began to cry uncontrollably, Mullis began strangling the child before taking him out of the car and stomping on his head, according to authorities.
The infant’s body was later found on the roadside. Mullis fled the state but was later arrested after surrendering to police in Philadelphia.
Mullis’ execution proceeded after one of his attorneys, Shawn Nolan, said he planned no late appeals in a bid to spare the inmate’s life. Nolan also said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that Texas would be executing a “redeemed man” who has always accepted responsibility for committing “an awful crime.”
“He never had a chance at life being abandoned by his parents and then severely abused by his adoptive father starting at age three. During his decade and a half on death row, he spent countless hours working on his redemption. And he achieved it. The Travis that Texas wanted to kill is long gone. Rest in Peace TJ,” Nolan said.
Mullis declined an offer earlier in the day to phone his attorney from a holding cell outside the death chamber, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Hannah Haney. His lawyers also did not file a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
In a letter submitted in February to U.S. District Judge George Hanks in Houston, Mullis wrote that he had no desire to challenge his case any further. Mullis has previously taken responsibility for his son’s death and has said “his punishment fit the crime.”
At Mullis’ trial, prosecutors said Mullis was a “monster” who manipulated people, was deceitful and refused the medical and psychiatric help he had been offered.
Since his conviction in 2011, Mullis has long been at odds with his various attorneys over whether to appeal his case. At times, Mullis had asked that his appeals be waived, only to later change his mind.
Nolan had previously told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during a June 2023 hearing that state courts in Texas had erred in ruling that Mullis had been mentally competent when he had waived his right to appeal his case about a decade earlier.
Nolan told the appeals court that Mullis has been treated for “profound mental illness” since he was 3 years old, was sexually abused as a child and is “severely bipolar,” leading him to change his mind about appealing.
Natalie Thompson, who at the time was with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, told the appeals court that Mullis understood what he was doing and could go against his lawyers’ advice “even if he’s suffering from mental illness.”
The appeals court upheld Hank’s ruling from 2021 that found Mullis “repeatedly competently chose to waive review” of his death sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the application of the death penalty for the intellectually disabled, but not for people with serious mental illness.
If the remaining executions in Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma are carried out as planned, it will mark the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.
The first took place Friday when South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death. Also Tuesday, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri. On Thursday, executions are scheduled for Alan Miller in Alabama and Emmanuel Littlejohn in Oklahoma.
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