2 drug dealers sentenced after selling fentanyl that killed young women in Fort Worth area
Two drug dealers accused of providing fentanyl that killed teenagers in the Fort Worth area were sentenced this week in separate cases, authorities said.
One case was in federal court and the other in Tarrant County court.
Ladraelyn Bolar, 34, sold fentanyl to an 18-year-old woman who died of an overdose, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said in a news release. He was sentenced on Tuesday, Dec. 17, to 17 years in federal prison.
Bolar was charged via criminal complaint in April, and he pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute fentanyl.
Bolar admitted he conspired with others to distribute fentanyl, according to court documents. He admitted he sold blue M-30 pills that contained the deadly drug to an undercover ATF agent on March 25.
A confidential informant introduced the agent to Bolar and accompanied him to a parking lot in Fort Worth, where Bolar sold the agent 100 pills for $250, authorities said. Later in the day, Bolar offered the undercover agent a “k-pack” of 1,000 fentanyl pills, and the agent then bought 900 more pills for $1,400.
Just five days before those sales, a friend of the woman who died told Fort Worth police officers that she and the victim had bought the pills from Bolar.
Fort Worth police and the ATF’s Dallas Field Division conducted the investigation.
In the other case, 24-year-old Ariel Vargas was found guilty of possession with intent to deliver fentanyl and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, according to the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
Saginaw police found fentanyl, meth, cocaine, marijuana and THC products at Vargas’ home while attempting to arrest him on a felony warrant in May 2022, the district attorney’s office said.
Jurors at Vargas’ trial also heard evidence about the warrant for delivering fentanyl to 19-year-old Valerie Vineyard, which contributed to her death in May 2021, the DA’s office said in a statement Thursday.
Vineyard’s mother, Andrea McCutcheon, told the Star-Telegram in a 2023 interview that her daughter took what she thought was a Percocet pill.
McCutcheon said she had gone back and forth on what sentence she thought Vargas should receive.
“I’m not one of those people that are just like let him go and do 50 years because to me, he lives with that every day,” she said. “But I do think he needs to have some type of punishment... . How many years is somebody’s life worth?”
This article includes information from the Star-Telegram’s archives.
