Danielle died at 19. Police failed her and a heartbroken PA family she left behind (opinion)
Editor's note: This column originally published on March 7, 2022.
I wish I could have met Danielle Hertzler.
She had an infectious laugh and a beautiful face, based on the videos and photographs I've seen. A tomboy, she loved motorcycles and cars, but she also loved makeup and clothes. She won friends easily with her big personality, but if she had a beef, she unleashed it mercilessly. She was so fearless that she once clocked a guy because he teased her that she didn’t have the strength to knock him off his chair. He found out: She did.
She fell into the world so quickly that her parents barely made it through the hospital doors before she was born.
She also slipped from the world too soon, at just 19 years old.
All that I know of Danielle comes from her family. She died two years before I met and started dating her dad, Marty; he and his daughter, Stephanie, are now like family to me.
I've written many stories about death and grief, but this is one close to my heart. They carry a relentless pain because they lost Danielle, and it’s deepened by the troubling void of justice for her death.
'How did we not see it?'
It was a Friday evening in May 2019, when Marty got home from work and called for Danielle, thinking she was upstairs in her room. The two of them lived alone in a two-story duplex in the south hills of Pittsburgh.
The pickup truck Danielle drove was sitting beside the house, so Marty thought she might be asleep. When he walked up the stairs, he found her on the floor. The heroin needle was beside her, and she was cold to the touch.
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Marty knew grief. He had walked down that path after the 2008 death of his wife, Kimmy, the mother of his two girls. In the year that followed, he quit his job as a truck driver to stay home with his kids and sort through their devastation. Danielle had been just 9 years old then. Marty took her to counseling and changed jobs to create stability for her and 17-year-old Stephanie.
Grief doesn’t end at the funeral or on an anniversary. As long as life goes on, the soldier of sorrow marches right beside it, and so it is for them. They have carried on, but Kimmy was and will always be the empty chair, a piece of their hearts missing.
Stephanie went to prom and finished high school. Danielle joined the cross country team in high school and worked at a clothing store. She smoked a little marijuana, but Marty and Steph didn’t know she’d tried heroin until she overdosed when she was 16. Narcan, delivered by emergency workers, saved her life that time.
Marty believes painkillers she had taken for a running injury led to harder drugs. The night of the first overdose, when she was released from the hospital, Danielle sat on a couch in their living room so that Marty could watch her. He spent the night calling every drug rehab he could find.
Call after call led him to believe no one would take her. Most had no beds for juveniles. When he finally found a facility, early the next morning, the woman asked when he could get Danielle there. It would take him 25 minutes to get there, and that was his answer. They would get in the car immediately.
After 28 days in the rehab, the facility sent her home, saying that insurance would no longer cover her stay. It was one of many moments in Marty’s life that he felt the weight of injustice. If he were rich or powerful, this wouldn’t have happened. She would have stayed in rehab as long as it took, or the rehab would have made sure to accommodate her.
She had gotten clean, though, and Marty believed she was recovering. Less than two years later, she was gone, lying on her bedroom floor, an overdose that likely happened hours earlier.
On that night, Marty started to ask himself questions that have dogged him and Steph for three years: What happened? What did we do wrong? How did we not see it?
What did happen?
The night Danielle died, the Cecil Township Police Department in Washington County took her cell phone. Marty and Steph had already seen the text messages between her and a man who sold her the drugs and, they believe, stayed with her while she took them and died. They knew his name and phone number.
What they know from the messages is that she was buying heroin, but they also believe the dealer added the fentanyl that killed her.
Overdose deaths in Pennsylvania are rising, specifically fentanyl-related overdoses. Law enforcement believes that most fentanyl is a cheap additive for other drugs – heroin and cocaine primarily – from dealers who want to enhance the high for their clients. When it doesn't kill them, it hooks them deeper, but the users often aren’t aware it’s present.
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The issue is so critical that the state legislature is considering a bill that would give free test strips to drug users to check for the presence of fentanyl.
The man who Marty believes delivered the drugs to Danielle is in federal prison today, but not for Danielle’s death. He pleaded guilty in federal court to distributing a mixture of heroin and fentanyl in another person's death.
Marty has heard that this man bragged in a bar about the deadly fentanyl-laced heroin he distributed.
I’m not going to share that drug dealer’s name here because he has never been charged in Danielle’s death. In fact, no one has been charged.
Not only has no one been arrested, no one has called the family to explain why there hasn’t been an arrest. Four times, I have called the Cecil Township Police, the department that would investigate Danielle’s case, and the chief has not responded to my calls.
In Pennsylvania, some counties – York and Bucks among them – have successfully prosecuted many people on the charge of death by drug delivery. My question to the chief would be: Will you pursue that charge in Danielle’s death? If not, why not?
The federal prosecution of the drug dealer in Danielle’s case arose out of a man’s death in western Pennsylvania. I reached the police chief where the drug dealer was arrested to ask about that charge and why this particular man was prosecuted federally and not charged with death by drug delivery.
He said this: “They are the toughest cases to do because, obviously, your best witness is dead. Working those backwards to somebody who actually delivered those drugs and that those drugs caused the death, it’s a mountain to get up, but we treat every drug death or suspected overdose, we treat it like a homicide case, and we work it until we can’t work it any further. Not very many end up in prosecution, but we’ve been very successful in prosecution.”
One of his investigators works on the DEA’s drug task force, helping to pursue those cases. The investigator couldn’t comment about this case, referring me to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Margaret Philbin, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, said her department doesn’t comment on why certain charges are chosen over others. She sent me the plea agreement for the drug dealer, but she didn’t comment any further.
Lost voices
A York County mother of two sons who died from drug overdoses – one of them to fentanyl – belongs to a Facebook group called “Lost voices of fentanyl.” These are loved ones – mostly parents — of people who overdosed on fentanyl. Some of them believe there needs to be an awakening for adults and teenagers, as the risk of overdosing from fentanyl is on the increase, but it's not receiving much attention.
Like those other parents, Marty feels helpless.
If he were rich or powerful, he would have justice for Danielle’s death, he believes. Marty calls it a murder, the same as that drug dealer pointing a gun at his daughter’s head and pulling the trigger. He’s angry that there’s no resolution for Danielle’s life, and he believes if he were a judge or a politician, the man who sold her a fatal dose of fentanyl would be in a Pennsylvania jail with a max sentence of 40 years.
Instead, that man is in federal jail for seven years for delivering drugs to someone else.
And Danielle Hertzler is gone.
What that means for Marty and Steph is another piece of their hearts that will never fit back into place. It means a lifetime of celebrations and beautiful, sunny days without her at their side. An empty chair that no one can ever fill. They believe in heaven. They believe they’ll see her one day, and they’ll hear her laughter and touch her beautiful face again.
I hope I do too.
Kim Strong can be reached at kstrong@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Fentanyl overdose deaths not prosecuted evenly in Pennsylvania
