A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a young man from Monmouth to over six years in prison for selling fentanyl that triggered the overdose death of a 15-year-old Salem boy in 2022.

Javen J. Pedro, 21, pleaded guilty in February in Portland U.S. District Court to distributing a controlled substance to a person under 21, according to his plea petition.

Federal prosecutors have not named the boy who died on the drugs that Pedro sold him. 

Pedro will serve six years of supervised release after he gets out of prison. He was in custody at the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution as of Tuesday, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons roster.

Pedro admitted to detectives at the time that he’d sold the teenager fentanyl five to 10 times before his death.

“Like Russian Roulette, eventually the cylinder of the gun stops on a bullet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Kerin wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

This account is based on a Salem Police Department affidavit.

Salem police responded on Feb. 24, 2022, to a house on Southeast Anneka Loop in the Morningside neighborhood of South Salem.

Officers found the teenager unconscious. He was taken to Salem Hospital where he was declared dead.

A witness told police that they watched the victim meet with someone in a vehicle in the driveway the night before. 

The teen returned to the house with pills and started smoking them in front of several juveniles. 

Police recovered several strips of tinfoil with blackened residue and one blue pill stamped M30. Such pills are increasingly being sold as fake oxycodone pills.

Footage from a neighbor’s security camera showed a sedan pull up to the house at night. Witnesses told police that the car belonged to Pedro. 

Pedro later told investigators that he drove to the victim’s house and sold him 10 oxycodone pills for $100. Pedro said he thought the pills were either oxycodone or Percocet.

Pedro was then arrested that day, charged with selling fentanyl. 

After a U.S. Magistrate judge released him the next day, he violated the judge’s conditions several times. That included using cocaine, fentanyl and marijuana, breaking curfew, and failing to comply with scheduled urine tests, notify authorities after having contact with law enforcement and not participating in a substance use evaluation.

Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Pedro to nine years in prison, while Pedro’s attorneys sought a five-year sentence. He was sentenced to six years and three months. 

“While he did not intend to kill his victim that sentiment is of little, if any, solace to the family that lost their child,” Kerin wrote in his court filing. 

Last year, Oregon experienced the highest rate of increase in fentanyl deaths in the country. They increased by over 67% from the previous year, compared with the national average of 5%.

The drug is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45.

Fentanyl killed over 200 people every day in 2022, with 73,654 fentanyl deaths that year. In the 12-month period ending in May 2023, over 73,765 people in the U.S. fatally overdosed on fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

“It is a tale that is tragic at every level and unfortunately one we repeatedly hear,” Kerin said in his filing. “Fentanyl is devastating the community and the death toll it is leaving within its wake is truly astronomical.”

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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