‘Drug dealers deserve prison’: Fentanyl dealer sentenced in overdosed death of teen
A prosecutor stifled tears, the judge paused to cry and a drug dealer convicted in the fentanyl-related death of a local teenager sobbed, turning to his own loved ones in agony, mouthing “I love you.”
The person who’d most been looking forward to Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, Mihaela Adelaida Steyer, didn’t live long enough to see justice for her son, Louis, whom they affectionately knew as “Louie.”
The 49-year-old mother died in April, less than two weeks before Angelo Loza pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.
Authorities had accused him of selling the teenager counterfeit prescription pills laced with fentanyl, the synthetic opioid said to be many times stronger than morphine.
Clark County District Court Judge Jacqueline Bluth Tuesday handed Loza a prison sentence between 30 months and eight years.
“She was never the same again,” Tom Steyer said about his late wife after she found their son dead at their home July 4, 2021.
Soon after their loss, Tom Steyer grew worried for his wife while he was working out of town and asked Las Vegas police for a welfare check.
Steyer arrived to see her in handcuffs, being taken by ambulance to a psychiatric hospital.
“She could not understand how she could get locked up for nine days for doing nothing other than being depressed,” said Tom Steyer, noting that Loza had not been jailed on the second-degree murder count he was originally charged with and later indicted on.
Loza was escorted out of the courtroom Tuesday in handcuffs after Judge Bluth — who said she believed Loza was not a bad person and that he was sorry — issued the sentence.
‘The most violent death’
Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Tina Talim cried as she held a picture of Louie. She told the court about the things the teen missed due to his death: a high school prom and graduation, and the chance to enroll in college to hone his writing skills.
In a series of interviews with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Steyers had recounted their son’s love for the written word.
“He will never write a book, a poem or another short story,” Talim told the court. “Louie didn’t make it past 16.”
The prosecutor recounted evidence found at the Steyer home that she said showed the desperate moments the teenager experienced before he took his last breath.
“For anyone who thinks fentanyl is an easy death, let me just say that overdosing on fentanyl is the most violent death,” Talim said. “The last few moments of Loue’s life were more violent than a bullet in the head.”
Attorney Nicholas Wooldridge argued that Loza should have gotten a more lenient sentence, telling Bluth that he had a tough upbringing, and that brain surgery at a young age led him down a path of addiction to prescription pills.
Wooldridge said his client, age 19 at the time, had only started selling drugs a few weeks before he sold the fatal counterfeit pills to Louis Steyer to finance Loza’s own addiction.
“This is a tragedy,” the attorney said. “It’s a tragic tale of two teenagers.”
Talim said two things could be true: “He can be both a user and drug dealer, and drug dealers deserve prison.”
Talim and Tom Steyer had asked Bluth to hand Loza the maximum sentence of four to 10 years.
“I’m terribly sorry for what’s happened and it was the biggest mistake ever made, and it will forever change my life,” an emotional Loza said. “I think about it every day, and every time I go to sleep.”
Loza said his teenage brother’s recent death had made experience a deep loss, and that he now understood “a fraction of the pain” the Steyer parents must have suffered. “I’m just terribly sorry.”
A father, husband’s pain
Tom Steyer began his remarks upset that Wooldridge had repeatedly and incorrectly referred to his son as “Steve.”
“I don’t know if I believe anything else he says,” said Steyer, his voice raised. “He can’t even get my son’s name, that to me that’s just a complete insult.”
His tone soon lowered to a whimper when he began recounting his wife’s suffering.
After their son’s death, she was diagnosed with severe depression, he said. “She could not understand our justice system here in the United States.”
A native of Romania, where she was a captain in the prison system, Mihaela Steyer was highly educated. The couple met in in her home country where her future husband went for law enforcement training. They traveled the world with Louie before settling in the Las Vegas area.
She began to act like her normal self, Tom Steyer said. At a cruise last year, he even spotted her dancing, an activity she loved, before tragedy struck, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal after the hearing.
However, “not a day went by that I did not find her crying someplace,” he told the court.
She’d received a preliminary cancer diagnosis, but she refused to seek treatment, seeing it as penance for failing her son, he said.
“This is what I deserve,” Tom recalled her saying. “I have to be with my son.”
Apartment by the cemetery
The couple moved to Ohio, renting an apartment with a patio overlooking the cemetery where Louie was buried next to his stillborn sister, Maria, Tom Steyer said. She would spend her days looking at the graveyard, he added.
Steyer said his wife’s grief turned to delusion. Some days, she would tell him their son was just playing hide-and-seek, a game she used to play with him.
Other days, she would accept he was dead, and say she couldn’t live without him, Steyer recalled.
Steyer said the Ohio medical examiner’s office hasn’t released her cause of death. She’s buried in the same plot as Louie and Maria.
Tom Steyer was left alone to pick up the pieces. Most mornings, he said, he grabs a coffee, walks about 100 yards to where his family is buried and talks to them.
“I never want to come back to this city again,” he told Bluth. “When I get back to Ohio, I want to be able to walk over to the cemetery and tell my wife and son that justice has finally been served.”
“I know that would make my wife very happy,” Steyer added.
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @rickytwrites.
