Seller guilty in fatal overdose of Concordia student

Port Washington — A Milwaukee man was found guilty Wednesday of supplying a college student heroin that killed him in his dorm room hours later.

Shuntaye Crenshaw, 24, was found guilty of first-degree reckless homicide/delivery of drugs in the death of Caleb Ford, 18, and faces up to 25 years in prison at his sentencing in January.

Ford, of Waukesha, had a history of drug abuse and was so desperate for heroin on Sept. 30, 2015, that he told some fellow Concordia University freshmen he could get them drugs through his source. He cobbled together a $200 order for a variety of illicit drugs in order to entice Crenshaw to make the drive to the Mequon campus from Milwaukee. The deal went down on a dead-end street just south of the college.

The others took the marijuana, ecstasy and what they thought was a concentrated marijuana oil. But they dropped Ford and his tenth of a gram of heroin back at Wittenberg Hall. Surveillance video shows Ford running to his room, where sevFord eral hours later, his roommate found him dead.

An autopsy showed Ford had died of “acute mixed drug intoxication,” from the heroin and Xanax in his system. Evidence in his room suggested Ford had snorted the heroin, and a forensic pathologist told jurors that any form of taking heroin can be deadly, and there is no safe level of the drug, which can slow the body’s automatic breathing response until a person dies of asphyxiation.

A security director at the college testified that it was the first case of heroin on a campus that normally sees four or five cases of marijuana possession a year.

Coincidentally, Crenshaw was stopped for speeding on Lake Shore Drive after the transaction but wasn’t charged in the death until months later. Using numbers from Ford’s cellphone, investigators arranged an undercover drug buy from Crenshaw in February at a Mequon gas station.

Crenshaw initially denied knowing Ford, then later said he was buying drugs from Ford on the night in question. At trial, his attorney called Crenshaw “a rip-off artist” who sold Ford fake heroin, suggesting that may have obtained the fatal dose during a 15-minute trip outside his dorm about 2 a.m.

District Attorney Adam Gerol called that “pure speculation” unsupported by any evidence. “Concordia is not the streets of Baltimore, with streetside drug delivery service,” like in “The Wire,” he said.

Ford’s roommate and two other students were convicted of possessing drugs or obstructing an officer and expelled from Concordia. They received probation or short jail sentences and did not testify against Crenshaw.