May 22--Two former Wesleyan students accused of selling a bad batch of a party drug that left 12 people seriously ill on the school's campus have been indicted on federal drug charges, officials said.
Eric Lonergan, 21, of Rio de Janeiro, and Zacahry Kramer, 21, of Bethesda, Md., were indicted on five drug distribution charges on Friday, according to Deirdre Daly, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut.
Twelve people, 10 of them students at the Middletown, Conn., university, were hospitalized after ingesting what they believed to be MDMA, or "Molly," on Feb. 21. Two of the students were listed in critical condition after taking the drug, and one of them "had to be revived after his heart stopped," according to a copy of the indictment.
"As the allegations in this indictment clearly show, these drugs are highly dangerous. Many of the Wesleyan students who overdosed were seriously ill and one student nearly died," Daly said in a statement. "The growth and evolution of synthetic drugs is a serious public health concern."
Federal prosecutors say Kramer sold the students a batch of Molly that contained AB Fubinaca, a form of synthetic marijuana sometimes associated with the street names "K2" or "Spice."
According to the indictment, drugs supplied by Lonergan were linked to another overdose incident in 2014. On Sept. 13, several students who purchased Molly from Lonergan and Kramer on campus by were hospitalized, the indictment said.
"Some of these students complained of feeling an extreme lethargy, while others complained of feeling an extreme and irrational fear of everything and everyone around them," prosecutors said in the indictment, describing the 2014 incident.
Lonergan began selling Molly from his dorm room in Nov. 2013, according to the indictment. In 2014, Kramer began buying the drug from Lonergan and selling it to other students, it said. In December 2014, prosecutors say, Kramer "took over for Lonergan as the primary supplier of Molly at Wesleyan."
Two other students, including a 20-year-old Southern California man, were arrested after the overdoses in February. They have been charged with state-level drug offenses, said Thomas Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.
