UNION COUNTY, N.C. — Officials in Union County said a new crime lab can help chip away at the state’s backlog, which would give families justice quicker after their loved ones succumbed to fentanyl.
“We can’t make fentanyl go away,” said Chief Tony Underwood, with the Union County Sheriff’s Office. “But we can deal with the consequences of that in a much quicker fashion.”
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Last year, Union County saw a 166% increase in opioid overdose deaths from the year before.
The sheriff’s office said most of those deaths were from fentanyl, which is the synthetic opioid the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said is 50 times stronger than heroin.
All those deaths are contributing to massive delays at the state medical examiner’s office.
Underwood said families are waiting months, sometimes more than a year, to find out how their loved one died.
Cabarrus County is also facing a fentanyl crisis and the new crime lab in Union County could affect the crisis there, too.
“To know that your child has died, but to not know why, is torture,” said Beth Abernathy, a mother. “I mean, those months were just day after day of misery for our family.”
Her son, Marshall, died from fentanyl poisoning in 2022.
“He was an amazing person, and the world is a darker place without him,” she said.
Abernathy waited nearly six months for the toxicology report from the medical examiner’s office.
Police arrested Aaron Furr in connection to Marshall’s death and charged him with death by distribution.
“All we were waiting on was that piece of paper from the medical examiner’s office,” Abernathy said.
The Union County Sheriff’s Office and its crime lab are working to cut that wait time down by months and bring justice quicker for victims and their families.
“We could get these people off the streets sooner if we had that result quicker,” Underwood said.
The crime lab, which is in its early phases, has the potential to conduct post-mortem blood drug toxicology analysis, which is the type of report that Abernathy waited months for.
Results could come in just weeks.
“We would be so much farther in our court case,” Abernathy said. “Had we not had to wait that long just for that piece of paper.”
VIDEO: Union County crime lab to help speed up criminal cases
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