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Daisy Markley found her child’s limp body slumped over at the end of their bed. One pill was all it took to kill Jax Markley, a transgender teen from Santa Clarita who overdosed on fentanyl just months after graduating from high school.
“I’ll never forget the sound of my wife’s scream calling me upstairs,” Matt Markley said, recalling his child’s death in November 2022. “I dropped everything and came running. It was my worst nightmare.”
It’s a nightmare the Markleys wake up to every morning. But on Monday, the grieving parents received some measure of relief when U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson sentenced the drug dealer responsible for Jax’s death to six years in prison.
The sentence triggered fiercely mixed emotions for the couple.
On one hand, they were grateful to be among the few parents who have lost a loved one to fentanyl and been able to see the dealer put behind bars.
On the other, they were furious that Wilson sliced the government’s recommended 12-year sentence in half. The shorter sentence caught the parents off guard after the dealer’s own attorney recommended 10 years, but Wilson said less time was reasonable because the defendant was a low-level dealer with a tough upbringing and a history of addiction.
“We are absolutely disappointed,” Daisy said. “We were expecting more, but I know that there are so many other parents that did not get justice.”
Justice was “minimally served” for Jax, said Matt, who stormed out of the court, suspending the room in silence as the door slammed behind him.
“It was almost more of a disservice because we failed to send a message to other dealers,” he said later that day.
The successful prosecution of a drug dealer for an overdose death is relatively rare, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Bobby Dean said.
But it has become more common in Los Angeles since the Sheriff’s Department launched its Opioid Overdose Response Task Force in 2022 and began investigating these deaths with the same rigor as a homicide investigation.
“Historically, for many departments, overdose deaths were just treated as accidental; it’s sad, but it is what it is,” said Dean, who heads the task force and assisted with Jax’s case. “We take a different approach where we try to identify the person who furnished the lethal dose and hold them accountable.”
The goal is to get justice for families and disrupt narcotics networks by securing lengthy prison sentences that serve as a deterrent to other dealers, he said. His team currently has about 35 cases in various stages of criminal prosecution.
Jax’s dealer, Skylar Lynn Mitchell, admitted to knowingly selling the counterfeit fentanyl-laced Percocet pill that killed Jax in 2022. At the time, Jax was 18 and Mitchell was 23.
According to court documents, Mitchell began selling drugs to the Santa Clarita teen when they were 16. She also admitted to witnessing a friend overdose and almost die from fentanyl before selling the fatal pill.
In July, she entered a plea deal for one count of possession with intent to distribute fentanyl.
The prosecutor, U.S. Atty. Kedar Bhatia, recommended a 12-year sentence, saying that her “craven crime” prioritized profit over life.
“A lengthy term of imprisonment is critical to sending a message of general deterrence: Those who sell fentanyl will face meaningful punishment,” he wrote in his sentencing recommendation.
But Wilson saw the situation differently, citing a series of factors about Mitchell’s traumatic upbringing in the foster-care system, history of addiction and “believable remorse” as justification for a shorter sentence.
“The defendant was a low-level dealer selling drugs to supply her own addiction,” Wilson said. “If the victim had not tragically overdosed and died, we probably wouldn’t be here.”
Mitchell said she takes “full responsibility” for her crime and called her time in custody “a blessing” that helped her become sober and set her on a better path in life.
“Not a day goes by where I don’t think about what happened,” she said in court. “If I could give my life to bring the victim’s back, I would do it in a heartbeat.” Her six-year sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Wilson questioned why a low-level fentanyl dealer should serve a 12-year sentence when there are many high-level dealers, who are likely responsible for a greater number of deaths, whom the U.S. attorney’s office does not pursue.
Dean told The Times that the Sheriff’s Department does not care whether the dealer is considered high level or low level, and investigates any case that results in death.
“If you furnish a lethal dose, I don’t care if it’s one pill or 1 million pills, we will absolutely put together a case, present that to prosecution and put you in prison,” he said.
He views the sentence against Mitchell as a victory, and said his team had seen evidence that sentences against dealers, even small ones, spread fear through regional drug-dealing networks.
A culture shift around the handling of overdose deaths also appears to be underway in the L.A. County district attorney’s office, where new Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman has vowed to prosecute fentanyl dealers more aggressively than his predecessor, George Gascón. During his campaign, Hochman advocated for charging fentanyl dealers with voluntary manslaughter or murder if someone dies as a result of the drugs they are selling.
Matt said the Sheriff’s Department presented Jax’s case to the U.S. attorney’s office after learning that Gascón’s office probably would pursue only a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a two- to four-year sentence.
Matt said he was grateful for the “heroic efforts” of the Sheriff’s Department, without which there would have been no hope of justice for Jax. Most of the other people in their support group of parents who lost loved ones to fentanyl have to live with the knowledge that their child’s killer is still out there, he said.
Among those parents is Amber Royer of Hemet, whose son Richard died — just like Jax — from a fentanyl-laced fake Percocet pill in 2020. He was 18 years old.
“The police department didn’t do an investigation, they did not seize his phone, they didn’t look into see where the product came from,” she said. “There was nothing, and I feel that the system failed my son.”
Sam Chapman, whose 16-year-old son, Sammy Berman Chapman, overdosed in 2021, said there were no charges filed against the dealer who brought the fentanyl-laced pill to their Santa Monica home “like delivering a pizza.” Now, Chapman and his wife must grapple with the fact that “Sammy’s killer still walks the streets of Los Angeles” while their son will never walk again.
Jax, Sammy and Richard purchased the pills that killed them on social media, as is often the case in teen overdose deaths.
Sixty-four families who lost loved ones to fentanyl are suing Snap Inc., arguing that the Santa Monica company is responsible for drug sales to teens that are facilitated through its app Snapchat.
More than 60 families are suing Snap, arguing the Santa Monica-based company is responsible for drug sales to teens that are facilitated through its app. Snap denies the allegations.
In court, Daisy said Jax’s death serves as a warning that “children can be taken advantage of, that social media is not safe, and that experimenting with drugs, even once, can be deadly.”
She described Jax as a “magical, unique and colorful” human being who was empathetic, deeply emotional and generous to a fault.
In their early teens, Jax told their parents that the gender assigned to them at birth didn’t feel right. Daisy and Matt supported Jax embracing a nonbinary gender identity but said the outside world was not as accepting.
Jax struggled to find their place in the world as a transgender teenager, suffering from anxiety and depression that was exacerbated during the isolation of the pandemic. Jax’s parents knew they were struggling but did not realize the extent of their drug use and continue to battle feelings of guilt on a daily basis.
“The thought that I am a failure as a mother, as a physician and as a human is never far away,” said Daisy, who works as a family doctor. “I know that I will mourn Jax until my last dying breath.”
Jax was adored by animals and was “a butterfly magnet,” said Daisy, who carries around a small plush butterfly with Jax’s ashes. Whenever she sees the polka-dotted insect flying by, she knows it’s Jax’s way of saying hi.
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