The defendant with the boyish face stood out from the usual parade of felons ushered into federal court in orange jumpsuits and shackles.
Stephen Paul Brinson, 18, is barely older than the Flower Mound and Carrollton high school students he supplied with deadly fentanyl-laced pills.
“You know you’re just a kid ... who committed old people crimes,” U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade told Brinson at his sentencing hearing Wednesday morning in Dallas.
Brinson faced up to 40 years in prison for supplying high school students and others with fake M30 pills laced with fentanyl. Authorities said he sold the drug from his parents’ Flower Mound home.
Kinkeade gave him eight years and four months. The judge called the case a tragic example of the “horrible scourge” of fentanyl and said many of the overdose victims looked like “sweethearts.”
“It’s as bad as it gets,” Kinkeade said. “This fentanyl is killing kids.”
The Dallas Morning News was first to report in February a rash of fentanyl overdoses in suburban North Texas schools that rattled and alarmed the community. At the time, three Carrollton-Farmers Branch students were among those who died. Now, four of the district’s students have died.
Nearly 900 people in Texas died from fentanyl-related overdoses in 2020, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. In 2022, more than 2,000 Texans died from fentanyl, state officials said.
Brinson’s attorney, Paul Lund, told the judge his client battled drug addiction and his arrest probably saved his life. Lund said no overdose deaths were directly linked to his client.
Brinson, he said, was not someone bringing the drug into the U.S. “by the truckload from Mexico” or importing it from China.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Phelesa Guy said Brinson sold hundreds of pills as well as cocaine and carried guns.
“All of this came about, your honor, because kids started dying and overdosing,” she said.
Brinson told the judge he was sorry, and he thanked for government “for saving my life.”
He was arrested in March and pleaded guilty in May to one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess a controlled substance. Prosecutors say he distributed or intended to sell about 3,000 counterfeit pills containing fentanyl powder.
Brinson was the principal supplier of the potent opioid to a Carrollton man who authorities allege capitalized on the arrests of two other suspected dealers to advertise fentanyl-laced pills, which caused a 14-year-old girl to overdose, authorities said.
Text messages identified a social media handle connected to Brinson as the “plug,” or source, for fentanyl pills, according to a criminal complaint.
Lund said during Wednesday’s sentencing hearing that his client was the first of the several defendants to plead guilty in the case. He said Brinson, with his newfound “gift of sobriety,” told him from the outset that he wanted to make things right.
“I can see the impact it has on him,” Lund said.
Brinson has a good family who is behind him, the defense lawyer said. Brinson’s parents, who attended the hearing, declined to comment.
Guy, the prosecutor, said that although Brinson is young, he is no stranger to the criminal justice system. Brinson, she said, has a conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he held a knife to his father’s neck during an argument.
Brinson had been to drug treatment three times but continued to sell the deadly drug to young people, Guy told the judge. She called him one of the area’s major sources of fentanyl pills.
Lund said the assault occurred when his client was just 14 — young enough to lack the “mental capacity” to make good decisions.
Brinson’s fentanyl dealing began in October 2022, court documents say, and he used Instagram and other messaging apps to discuss, negotiate and sell drugs.
When authorities searched the Flower Mound home of Brinson’s parents in March, they found about 1,800 fake M30 pills containing fentanyl in his bedroom, including crushed pills on a nightstand, court records show.
Brinson’s parents were out of town during the search, Guy said. His girlfriend was home and had just taken some of the fentanyl pills when officers arrived with a search warrant, she said.
Officers also found a pound of marijuana, THC cartridges, “multiple grams of cocaine,” digital scales, and packaging material, court records say.
Officers seized two handguns from a safe in the home. And they found a note from Brinson’s parents with a list of chores and a warning: “Don’t meet people in front of the house or in view of the house.”
Brinson’s parents told police they knew their son used fentanyl but did not know he was dealing, according to court records.
While the house was searched, officers stopped Brinson’s car as he was driving to deliver an M30 pill with fentanyl to a customer in Flower Mound, authorities said.
Police found a pistol, an AR-15 rifle and ammunition inside the car, the complaint said. And officers found a small baggie of M30 pills inside his sock after taking him to Carrollton jail, according to the complaint.
Eight others have been charged in the case.
In February, Luis Eduardo Navarrete and Magaly Mejia Cano were arrested and charged in connection with distributing fentanyl-laced pills that killed three Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD students and hospitalized six others.
Another man, Jason Xavier Villanueva, whom authorities described as the “main source of supply” for the fentanyl in the overdose cases, was later arrested. All three have since been indicted.
Donovan Jude Andrews was later arrested after authorities alleged he advertised and sold fentanyl-laced pills to teens through social media after Navarrete and Mejia Cano were jailed.
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