Heroin dealer gets 14 years for death of addict

Sold victim the drug that later killed him

In January 2015, Ryan Bell’s mother, Ann, found him slumped over his bed in his third-floor bedroom in Bloomfield.

He was dead at age 26 from a heroin overdose.

He had been in and out of rehab, and Ann Bell knew his dealer was Antonio Rutherford, a felon who lived a few blocks away and sold heroin from the deli counter at the nearby Shursave grocery, where he worked the evening shift.

After Mr. Bell’s death, the U.S. attorney's office indicted Rutherford as part of a Justice Department crackdown on dealers whose drugs kill addicts.

On Friday, Rutherford paid the price when U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon sent him to federal prison for 14 years for heroin distribution as well as several gun offenses.

“You have caused someone to die,” the judge told him as Mr. Bell’s family watched from the gallery. “That's something you will have to live with for the rest of your life. It didn't seem to bother you much at the time because you merely changed your phone number and kept dealing.”

Testimony at a lengthy sentencing hearing revealed that Rutherford, 28, had sold Mr. Bell heroin the day before he died on Jan. 19, 2015, and then changed his cell phone number when he found out Mr. Bell had died.

On the stand, he said he changed the number to avoid being tied to Mr. Bell’s death, but he also denied

he had been selling heroin to him.

“I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” Rutherford said later in addressing the judge. “What I did was totally wrong.”

Yet he insisted he didn’t sell Mr. Bell the heroin that helped to kill him.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Haller said Rutherford lied under oath and that he caused Mr. Bell’s death. Phone records showed that Mr. Bell and Rutherford had talked repeatedly in the days before his death as Mr. Bell was looking to buy heroin.

“Ryan Bell’s death was not inevitable. Antonio Rutherford could have said no” in refusing to sell to Mr. Bell, Mr. Haller said. “Ryan Bell didn’t have to die.”

Ann Bell testified that her son had suffered a collapsed lung in high school and was prescribed narcotic painkillers. He became addicted. Like many addicts, he switched to heroin and had been using it for about two years before he died. He’d been in treatment locally and in Tennessee. At home, she said she searched his room every day for stamp bags to try to keep him clean. She said Rutherford had called her house and she knew he washer son’s supplier.

“We talked about Antonio because I knew that was where Ryan was getting his heroin,” she said. “We told [Rutherford] he needed to stay away from [Ryan].”

The Rutherford case was among several announced in 2015 by then-U.S. Attorney David Hickton as part of his office’s efforts to put heroin dealers in prison for decades or even life if agents and police could prove their product killed someone.

In Mr. Bell’s case, Rutherford was allowed to plead to a lesser charge because toxicology tests showed that Mr. Bell died of a combination of heroin and alcohol and not just the heroin.

But Mr. Haller said Rutherford is a repeat felon with a prior federal conviction who deserves a long prison term.

When Rutherford was being investigated, Mr. Haller wrote in a warrant application that he sold heroin directly from the Shursave deli in 2014 and 2015, handing out drugs to customers “as if he was giving them a bag of cheese or some other product.”

In addition to the prison term, the judge ordered Rutherford to pay more than $14,000 for Mr. Bell’s funeral.