Four Charged in San Francisco Teen's Overdose Death as DEA Says New Super-Opioid Is Headed Up California's Drug Corridors

Since 16-year-old Dante Lacourte died in his San Francisco home on April 7, the case has moved from a mother's 911 call to formal felony charges against four adults, and now to a DEA warning that the drug that killed him is spreading up California's trafficking corridors toward the Central Valley.

According to a New York Times account cited by Patch, Christina Lacourte walked into her son's bedroom that morning and found him turning blue. She grabbed the Narcan she kept in her kitchen. It wasn't enough. The medical examiner later found Dante had taken a combination of drugs, including cychlorphine, a substance that had never before shown up on a San Francisco coroner's report, per the same account.

On Friday, September 11, San Francisco prosecutors charged Nicholas Wallace, 46, Leander Pitts, 46, Sharonee Hyson, 44, and Starr Lamare, 39, with drug and firearm offenses stemming from the investigation, Patch reported. Wallace alone faces two counts of selling a substance in lieu of a controlled substance plus additional possession and firearm charges, according to the charging documents Patch obtained.

How the case came together

SFPD Chief Derrick Lew said the department opened its investigation after officers responded to the Bush Street overdose in April, collecting pharmaceutical evidence from the scene and running controlled drug buys to trace the supply chain, according to The Epoch Times.

On September 8, officers served a warrant at Wallace's home on the 700 block of O'Farrell Street and found pills believed to contain oxycodone along with cocaine, authorities said. Hyson, who was on parole at the time, was there when officers arrived and was found carrying 11.7 grams of cocaine base and a loaded gun, per Patch.

The next day, warrants at two more addresses turned up over 20,000 counterfeit pills, including Xanax, oxycodone, hydrocodone, cyclobenzaprine and fentanyl, plus 68.5 grams of MDMA, 6.5 grams of black tar heroin, a semi-automatic assault rifle, a semi-automatic pistol and $2,267 in cash, according to Patch and NBC Bay Area.

At a joint press conference, Mayor Daniel Lurie framed the case as a test of whether the city had learned from the fentanyl era. "San Francisco was caught flat footed by the fentanyl crisis. We will not let that happen again. When a new deadly drug appears in San Francisco, we are going to find it, we are going to track it, we are going to warn people about it," Lurie said, per NBC Bay Area. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins called Dante's death "a sad day" for the loss of a 16-year-old "who I'm sure had a lot ahead."

The drug itself

Cychlorphine was first detected at a DEA laboratory in Florida in April 2024, with the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education confirming its identity later that year, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and reporting from The Epoch Times. It's undetectable on standard fentanyl test strips and hospital opioid urine screens, per an April 30 advisory from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and the DEA says reversing an overdose "might require several doses of naloxone."

The numbers on how far it has spread vary depending on when they were measured. As of March 2026, the White House advisory cited by The Epoch Times put confirmed overdoses or deaths in at least 24 states, with a cluster of 19 confirmed deaths in East Tennessee. Speaking to KMPH in Fresno this weekend, DEA Assistant Special Agent Peter Vainauskas gave an updated, narrower count: deaths reported in 19 states including five in California, and roughly 100 seizures nationwide, about 35 of them this year.

Vainauskas said no cychlorphine has been seized yet in the Central Valley, but that major trafficking routes from Mexico run up Highways 99, 5 and 41 into Northern California, where the drug has already turned up. "I just believe it's a matter of time before we do get a seizure," he said.

The public-health argument

Harm-reduction researchers make a fair point here: arrests alone don't stop a new synthetic drug from reaching users who have no idea what's actually in the pill they bought. Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys told Ground News that resuming public wastewater testing, which San Francisco plans to restart this fall, could flag emerging substances like cychlorphine before they cause fatalities rather than after.

Taking 20,000 counterfeit pills, an assault rifle, and two handguns off San Francisco streets is a real reduction in immediate supply, whatever the long-term trafficking trends look like.

San Francisco's public health department has confirmed Dante Lacourte as the city's first cychlorphine death, according to NBC Bay Area. CBS Bay Area separately noted the city logged 34 fatal overdoses in July, its lowest monthly total since it began tracking drug deaths in 2020. Whether the wastewater surveillance program catches the next batch before more deaths, and whether the Central Valley sees its first seizure before or after the DEA's warning turns out to be accurate, are both open questions heading into fall.