A jailhouse drug dealer is set to spend three years in the clink after getting caught smuggling narcotics into the slammer through the U.S. Postal Service. Katherine Smothers, 34, was sentenced on May 6 for mailing meth and fentanyl-soaked letters to an inmate at a San Diego County jail, authorities said.
Sgt said the San Diego Sheriff’s Department's Mail Processing Center (MPC) became suspicious after spotting letters that seemed soaked in some sort of liquid. Aaron Brooke, a spokesperson for the department. Tests later revealed the letters, mailed between December 2022 and April 2023, were indeed saturated in liquid methamphetamine and fentanyl, Brooke said in a statement.
The smuggling bust was part of a combined effort by the Sheriff's Detention Investigations Unit and Homeland Security Investigations' Fentanyl Abatement and Suppression Team (FAST), which targets prominent fentanyl distributors in the region. The partnership effort led to Smothers' arrest last April in Santee and subsequent charges, including bringing drugs into jail and conspiracy to commit a crime.
"The Sheriff's Department is proud to be a partner agency of FAST," said Brooke via the San Diego Sheriff’s Department news, highlighting the collaborative crackdown on drug trafficking. Smothers, born July 25, 1989, was nabbed after authorities discovered her drug-laden correspondences were intended for a locked-up associate at the George Bailey Detention Facility in Otay Mesa.
