The tragic story of the three Kansas City Chiefs fans who were found lying dead in the snow behind the house of a friend two days after they all gathered to watch a game continues to baffle police, but experts say that it seems likely that the men died of drug overdoses.
The Kansas City Police have pointedly noted that they are not investigating the deaths as a murder case. But they are also awaiting toxicology tests to see if there are any substances in the systems of the dead men, and more charges could be filed after that information is in hand.
The story is tragic, for certain. Three men, David Harrington, 37, Ricky Johnson, 38, and Clayton McGeeney, 36, were all found frozen to death in the backyard of the home of Jordan Willis two days after they all gathered at Willis’s house to watch the Chiefs take on the LA Chargers on Jan. 7.
The three men never made it home, and Willis said he had fallen asleep before they left his living room. When he woke up, the three friends were gone, and he went about his business. But he claims he was entirely unaware that all three of his pals had gone into the backyard as Kansas City suffered through a snowy, freezing winter week. The men died there, but Willis says he never knew where they all went.
Willis has since packed up and abruptly moved out of his house as neighbors have begun developing doubts about his story and friends and family of the dead men began asking questions.
Now, experts who have talked to the media claim that the chief suspect for the cause of the deaths is a drug overdose.
Alcohol is unlikely, though it may have contributed, forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden told Fox News.
“If they all took alcohol, they would not collapse around the same time. People react differently to large doses of alcohol, metabolize it at different speed,” Dr. Baden said.
However, if they all took the same drug, it could easily have led to them all succumbing to it at about the same time, Baden added.
“It would be the type of drug that causes a person to be disoriented,” he said. “Fentanyl-type drugs can cause disorientation and can cause a rapid sleep-like loss of consciousness.”
Baden added, “If these four people all took it together, the guy on the couch sleeps it off for a long time, whereas the three who went outside disoriented maybe didn’t have on their coats. Because of the freezing weather, it [could be] a combination of the drugs and hypothermia that caused their death.”
Baden said that the deaths would not have been instant. The men would have wandered outside, disoriented. Then began to fall into a drug-induced coma. And then the harsh weather would have finished them off while they were unconscious.
“They probably aren’t dead when they collapse in the snow, but because of the cold, they then go into a deeper coma and die from the hypothermia,” Baden explained. “They wouldn’t have died if they had gotten home all right. But if they were in the snow, they die in the snow. They don’t feel any pain or anything. They can’t wake up in time.”
Retired DEA special agent Derek Maltz agrees with Baden that the most likely root cause of the three men’s deaths is some sort of fentanyl poisoning. In his reckoning, it is “a clear case of cocaine laced with fentanyl.”
“This is happening in every state,” Maltz told Fox News. “Everyone is so fixated on ‘three people dead, they were frozen to death in the backyard.’ But they don’t know that this is happening all the time in multiple states all across the country every day. People are not putting this together. The news is just reacting to stuff instead of understanding what’s really happening. That’s where it gets really sad for me. The more we talk about it, it’s just people continuing to die.”
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