A 48-year-old California man will spend the rest of his life in prison for supplying drugs that killed a Fairbanks man in 2020.
Junior Gafatasi Tulali was sentenced Tuesday in Fairbanks by U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason.
In April, a federal jury in Fairbanks found Tulali guilty of one charge of distributing fentanyl that resulted in a death. Because Tulali had a prior federal conviction for drug trafficking in the 1990s, federal sentencing guidelines mandate life imprisonment.
At the heart of the case, according to to the government, was evidence that Tulali made a deal to sell hundreds of pills in Alaska that resulted in the death of a 22-year-old in Fairbanks and several other non-fatal overdoses.
Tulali arranged to sell 500 opioid pills to a contact in Alaska for $5,000 or $10 a pill, according to a sentencing memorandum from prosecutors. Two days later, he mailed a package to Andre Brown in Fairbanks. Inside were 480 pills meant to look like pharmaceutical oxycodone painkillers, but were in fact the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl mixed with acetaminophen, according to the memorandum.
The pills were sold around town in the following days, resulting in several non-fatal overdoses and the death of 22-year-old Jacob Lee.
According to evidence filed by prosecutors in the court documents, Lee was struggling with recovery from drugs when he bought two of the pills from a third dealer, Winston Crockett, for $120 near Pioneer Park. A short time later, Lee’s father found him dead in his bedroom from an overdose.
Both Brown and Crockett were convicted earlier and received lengthy prison sentences, along with two other men involved with selling pills from the same shipment.
Outside his incarceration, Tulali lived most of his life in southern California. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage says that dealers from out of state target Alaska because of the high prices imported drugs can command.
“The defendant deliberately recruited (Brown) to distribute the counterfeit pills in Fairbanks where they could be sold at a high profit margin,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “Tulali bears responsibility for that decision, which in this case resulted in a death and multiple non-fatal overdoses.”
Tulali served nearly two decades in federal prison for an incident in the 1990s where he was caught bringing crack cocaine from California to Hawaii. Since his release in 2012 he’d been gainfully employed and was married and raising a son, according to court filings from his defense attorney, who also stated that Tulali had struggled off and on with substance abuse since he was a teenager.
At the time of Tulali’s arrest, the lawyer wrote to the court, he was “drinking alcohol daily, regularly using methamphetamine and was addicted to pain pills.”
Given the strict sentencing requirements attached to Tulali’s guilty conviction, his primary request was to serve his term at a federal correctional facility in southern California, close to his family.
Several different law enforcement agencies from the federal, state and local level were involved with the case.