Maylia Sotelo arrived in a black Cadillac. It pulled down an alley by the Fox River, which cuts through the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. On that Tuesday evening in November 2022, she stepped out of a rear door and into another car. Maylia was 15 years old and slight, with a soft, girlish face and large, upturned eyes. For $50, she sold a man five “blues,” round pills stamped with “M30” that passed for Percocet. Narcotics investigators from the Brown County Drug Task Force were listening over a wire and, within minutes, their informant turned over his buy. Like every fake Percocet the task force seized that year, the pills were actually fentanyl. The officers, though, decided to let Maylia leave.
Maylia was comfortable around the business of drugs. Her childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers; hollowed-out pens littered the floors, and strange men let themselves in at all hours. She had grown up with three older sisters, who had all been kicked out or left because of their mother’s violence. It fell to Maylia to protect Maliasyn, two years younger, from their mom’s unpredictable delusions. She would lose herself in uppers and opioids, start yelling out of nowhere or cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, she locked the girls in the house for days.
Before Maylia sold blues, she sold weed. She had been smoking since fifth grade. The first time she tried weed, she found herself laughing at nothing. “Why would I sit here being sad and sober when I can be high and happy?” she thought. She hated staying home, so after class, she took Maliasyn to a trap house where teens smoked blunts on the first floor and adults met in the bedrooms upstairs. The guys there, a couple of years older, were dropping out of school to sell weed. When Maylia was 13, she started dealing, too, because everyone was doing it.
By the start of her sophomore year at West High School, blues had overtaken bud in popularity. Across the city, boys blared songs about popping percs (“Yeah, just popped a 30, yeah, a 30 / It could change your life or it could ruin it, that’s the dirty”), and blue circle emojis with an “M” dominated Snapchat and Facebook. Maylia didn’t use percs. Like everyone at West, she knew they were fake, but nobody talked about what that meant. Instead of the oxycodone in Percocet, the pills contained filler and fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.
Two days after the drug task force confirmed that Maylia was selling fentanyl, she arranged through a friend to buy a bulk order of blues from a man she’d never met. The city was facing a dry spell, so instead of her typical hundred-pill order from her usual source, she asked the man for a thousand. When her friend delivered the percs, she poured them onto a tray in her lap and pushed each chalky pill with a key, counting them one by one. She texted her customers: “Back in motion.” The next day, she caught a ride to an apartment complex and sold a pill to a teenager named Jack McDonough.
Early the following week, Maylia told Maliasyn that she’d be home soon, put on her “Sesame Street” slides and settled into the passenger seat of a friend’s Audi Q5. He drove her to Culver’s for a strawberry milkshake and then to Taco Bell for a sale. When they parked, lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Drug task force agents in unmarked cars rushed in and Maylia was handcuffed. “I don’t think you can do that,” she said quietly, as an officer went to pat her down. “I’m a minor.”
Agents took Maylia to a juvenile detention center in Fond du Lac, an hour south of Green Bay, and booked her on drug charges. Since she had no criminal history, the prosecutor and a county caseworker began negotiating with Maylia’s attorney. They presented a consent decree, the juvenile justice equivalent of a deferred prosecution agreement, which proposed that Maylia could be released to her father, whom she barely knew, placed on an ankle monitor, and required to satisfy certain conditions, like attending therapy or substance abuse counseling. If Maylia complied for six months, her charges could be dropped. After Christmas, while her dad was preparing his home, the county moved her into the less restrictive setting of shelter care, a coed house for kids.
In early January, a month after the arrest, a police officer arrived looking for Maylia. She was in the shower, getting ready for a hearing where she expected to be let out. Instead of taking her to court, the officer drove her to jail. There, he told her that she was under arrest for first-degree reckless homicide. Jack McDonough had died of an overdose.
Maylia would be the first juvenile in Wisconsin charged with homicide for providing the fentanyl that led to a death. In a country flooded with the drug, at a time when teens were dying from opioids at record rates, far outpacing plans to help them, she would be treated as an adult by a justice system that has no clear guidelines for how to handle the kids who are selling.
Jack McDonough first tried blues a year earlier, at the age of 17. With his girlfriend, he learned to crush the pill on a swatch of tinfoil, run a lighter underneath it and inhale the smoke through a straw. Calm blanketed them, muting their anxiety. Sometimes, it triggered a surge of confidence, a feeling that anything was doable. More often, it let them drift into nothingness, a fuzzy space between wakefulness and sleep. “We thought we were doing Percocets,” his girlfriend told me. “I didn’t even really know what a perc was.” At first, they smoked the pills a few times each week, sitting in Jack’s car between classes at Southwest High. Within a couple months, they needed one a day or they’d be sick — vomiting, legs shaking, unable to sleep. “I told Jack that I’m pretty sure it’s not even real percs, I’m pretty sure it’s fentanyl, and he was like, ‘What? No. I’m not doing fentanyl.’”
Until recently, opioids almost exclusively claimed the lives of adults. Since COVID-19 began, though, the rate of overdose deaths among teenagers has rocketed, more than doubling in three years. It’s not that more teens are using drugs, but that fentanyl has made the supply deadlier than ever. Many know or discover that the pills on the street are tainted but don’t want to stop — until they can’t. In a matter of weeks or a couple of months, they’ve become addicted. Today, over 300,000 kids under 18 are estimated to have an opioid-use disorder.
As fentanyl has rapidly entered the world of adolescents, the major institutions that touch teens’ lives have been unprepared to manage the fallout. Few doctors are offering the recommended medication, most schools are ill-equipped to help, and the justice system is treating children as criminals. Parents don’t know what to look for: the straws, the ash marks, the weight loss, the nausea of withdrawals. Teens are on their own. With nowhere to turn, each week, 22 high-school-aged kids — a classroom’s worth — are dying from overdose.
Jack’s parents had separated when he was an infant, and he’d grown up with his mom, Carrie, who owned a small house in De Pere, a suburb of Green Bay, and worked in sales at a truck maintenance supply company. He saw his father on weekends and holidays and in the summer. Carrie is warm and effusive, a self-labeled “helicopter parent,” with a deadpan sense of humor. Jack preferred body comedy, jump-scaring anyone he could. If he wanted to learn karate, Carrie booked him classes; if he wanted to swim with friends, she drove them to the water park. Together, the two worked out, volunteered to walk rescue dogs, went shopping, talked through plays he could run on his basketball team. After Carrie remarried when Jack was 11, he continued to confide in her about his insecurities and offered updates on his various crushes.
By high school, Jack was a gangly 6 foot 3, and he preferred duck hunting to sitting in class. At Southwest, 4 miles from Maylia’s school, he kept falling behind. He had trouble believing in himself: He told his mom he thought he was too slow. She would stay up late helping him with homework or she’d do it for him when he gave up. With his friend Mason, he liked to break down old cars just to fix them back up. The two clicked “like Buzz and Woody,” Mason told me. They would wrestle in public, but “behind closed doors, he was like a teddy bear.”
The winter he started smoking percs, Jack cut out most of his friends. In early 2022, he began buying from a young dealer who went by Speakers, and soon he was introduced to other teens who were selling. Within a couple months, he dropped 15 pounds. Carrie worried he was bulimic. She would press her ear against the bathroom door, listening for hints of purging. He’d always been sweet and respectful, but that semester, he started disobeying her, becoming hostile out of nowhere. On weekends, he racked up speeding tickets and broke curfew; Carrie and her husband, Ryan, clamped a wheel lock on his car. On weekdays, he retreated to his room after school and went to bed at sundown. Carrie had no idea, but he often video-chatted with his girlfriend so the two could smoke percs at the same time.
Carrie booked him a therapy appointment, but the first slot she could get was a few months out. She told his school counselor that she thought he was using drugs but says she was brushed off. Carrie couldn’t prove anything — the drug tests she randomly gave Jack kept coming back negative. Others, though, knew what was going on. A classmate texted saying that he had lost two friends and didn’t want to see Jack die, too. “1 perk can’t kill you lmao, you’d have to smoke like 10 perks to even think abt overdosing,” Jack replied. “It just gets you high, for like an hour.” Mason also worried, and he sometimes probed Jack, who swung from denial to regret. “He knew he was addicted,” Mason said. “He knew it was hurting the people around him. He also knew he couldn’t stop on his own.”
In April of 2022, Carrie got a call from Tracy Liska, a police officer assigned to Southwest. Jack had been caught going door to door, pretending to fundraise for St. John’s Homeless Shelter — a place Maylia’s mom sometimes stayed. Liska had heard rumors that kids at school were using fake Percocet, which she knew was probably fentanyl, but she couldn’t search them unless she had reason to believe they had pills on them. Jack was “attached at the hip” to his girlfriend, “so in love,” Liska told me, and kids said she was using. When Carrie arrived at her office, stammering that something wasn’t right with Jack, Liska told her that a classmate was calling him a “perkhead.” Back home, Carrie took Jack’s phone and started scrolling. She found streams of texts setting up deals to buy “erks” and photos and videos of Jack smoking them.
Carrie didn’t know that the gold-standard treatment for teens addicted to opioids is buprenorphine, a long-acting opioid that strips away withdrawal symptoms and cravings and protects against overdose. Each year, on average, only 372 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 are getting the drug, according to the best national data. Most pediatricians aren’t trained in addiction and don’t feel comfortable prescribing the medication, and many clinics are afraid of the liability that comes with treating minors. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only 39 rehabs in the country offer buprenorphine to those under 18. Carrie called the most comprehensive national resource hotline in the country, run by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; it pointed her to Libertas, one of the only centers for adolescents in Green Bay. But when she reached Libertas, which doesn’t offer buprenorphine to kids, it had closed its inpatient program for teens.
After five days of calls to every rehab she could find, Carrie heard back from a residential facility in Minnesota, a Hazelden Betty Ford clinic. For the first time, it seemed like she’d found a solution. Before Jack left home, he wrote to his girlfriend’s mom to say that her daughter needed help. “We chose the wrong road to walk, and it is worse than I thought,” he texted. “I need you to make sure you keep her away from these kinds of drugs no matter what the case is. I can’t lose her to addiction, she is going to tell you that she hates you and tell you things to make you feel terrible about yourself and your job as a parent. But what I feel for her is real love and I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t care.” To his mom, he scribbled, “I’m trying to do better to be a better son. I hope you can forgive me for everything.”
The same spring that Jack entered rehab, Maylia was introduced to blues by her older sister Marianna. Since leaving home at the age of 13, Marianna had been bouncing between relatives and a boyfriend, between a local shelter and the back seat of a car. She’d sold weed to support herself, and then she’d leveled up to percs. She’d climbed so high that some considered her Green Bay’s biggest dealer.
Maylia was captivated by her sister — she was “self-made and self-paid.” Marianna could buy at $3 a pill and sell at $20. At 18, she owned a midnight blue Mercedes Benz and an apartment on Imperial Lane, the main stretch in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She had decorated it with silver-studded couches and filled it with a collection of Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton purses. With their mom caught up in her own addiction, Marianna took the girls in. Often, when she crisscrossed the city selling, Maylia sat shotgun, looking out for cops. She took photos of her sister, draped in long, neon-orange wigs, smirking next to 4-foot stacks of cash. Sometimes, they flashed fans of bills together.
In August of 2022, Marianna was arrested for dealing fentanyl and held in Brown County Jail. Maylia and Maliasyn went to stay with their grandmother, a manager at Family Dollar, who they said rarely stocked the kitchen. Soon, Maylia’s phone would not stop ringing. Marianna’s clients were asking if she had any idea where they could buy blues. “Money kept calling,” Maylia said. “It was calling me.”
Through Marianna’s contacts, Maylia bought a hundred pills for $500. She could double her money in a day. In the mornings before school, she tucked a handful of pills in her panties and another handful in her purse. Customers came to her. The 19-year-olds told the 18-year-olds, who told the 17-year-olds, and then the kids she had known as infants. Maylia was a good student with a quiet, observant demeanor. She didn’t like to sell on campus. Sometimes, classmates begged. The stink, like burnt popcorn, hung in the girls’ bathroom. Kids walked the hallways scratching their faces.
The only experience Maylia enjoyed more than smoking weed was surprising Maliasyn with a gift and seeing the look on her face. “Sometimes, I just wished that everything, everybody around us, would disappear, and it could just be me and my sister,” she said. Maylia hid packets of ramen and goldfish and hot Cheetos around their bedroom; she bought Maliasyn pink low-top Nike Dunks and brought home a PlayStation a customer had traded for blues. She promised she’d stop selling once she’d saved $3,000 for a car, which she couldn’t yet buy because she wasn’t old enough to drive. Maliaysn reminded her to be smooth and slow down. Instead, she kept going. “Her name was ringing in the streets,” a competing dealer told me. Maylia loved being one of the only girls in the game. For as long as she could remember, people had called her Princess. Now they called her Hollywood, for her big curly wigs, thick feline lashes and how little interest she showed in the kids at school.
Maylia knew that people were overdosing, but she didn’t realize that a tiny amount of fentanyl could kill: 2 milligrams, which, if poured on a penny, would only cover Abraham Lincoln’s ear. On Dec. 1, 2022, just after the informant bought from Maylia, a customer told her that his girlfriend died from pills and he didn’t want to use anymore. Maylia sent her condolences, adding: “im glad you thinkin smarter.” Two days later, she saw Jack’s girlfriend’s Facebook story announcing that Jack had died. She’d hung out with his girlfriend once and messaged right away. “I’m so sorry for your loss mami keep your head up
