In a 12-month window, three young people – Spencer Newsom, Hailey Modesitt and Kade Webb – all died of fentanyl overdoses. But these fresh faces had more in common than a cause of death: All three of them were close to a Roseville drug dealer named Carson Schewe. As bodies were dropping in Schewe’s orbit – including those of his best friend and his girlfriend – the dealer’s response was to record social media videos of himself flashing piles of cash and laughing as he tossed money in the air.

But the passing of Webb eventually took the smile off Schewe’s face. That’s because it caused Placer County Sheriff’s detectives and Roseville police investigators to launch a major investigation into his fentanyl trafficking. This morning, Schewe was the fourth fentanyl dealer in California history to be found guilty of Second-degree Murder for killing one of his buyers – and only the second dealer to be handed that fate at the end of a jury trial.

The probe into Schewe’s activities began after Webb was found unresponsive in the bathroom of a Safeway in East Roseville on Dec. 3, 2021. Today, as Schewe waited to be sentenced, Webb’s father, Kurt Webb, told the court that he’d arrived at the business that night after paramedics lost their battle.

“He was covered by a yellow tarp,” Kurt remembered. “I sat down on the floor of the store knowing it was my son … I kept thinking about the looks on my family’s faces when they arrived at the scene and learned who was under that tarp.”

An investigative team headed by Sheriff’s Detective Patrick Craven ultimately arrested Schewe for Webb’s death.

Placer District Attorney Morgan Gire, who was seeing overdose deaths in his county up by 450%, settled on going with a murder charge. In September, a jury agreed.

Schewe’s defense team began today’s sentencing hearing by asking Placer Judge Michael Jones to grant a new trial. The lawyers offered a complicated legal argument that Deputy District Attorney Devan Portillo had made jurors aware of some deaths connected to Schewe – beyond Webb’s – in an improper fashion. The judge wasn’t buying it.

“It’s an argument between you folks,” Jones decided, “and I know the Defense will disagree with me, but it sounds like you’re saying the Prosecution didn’t have the right to argue facts that are in evidence … Based on that, I don’t find that there was any prosecutorial misconduct.”

With that last-ditch maneuver gone, the Defense suggested mercy from the Court, reminding Jones that Schewe was convicted under a new and novel legal theory and then arguing little separates his deeds from the crimes of most drug-dealers.

Jones responded with a quote from John Adams.

“‘Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence,’” Judge echoed from a founding father. He went on to sentence Schewe to 20 years-to-life in prison.

Just prior to that, the court had also heard from Webb’s mother, Elizabeth Dillender, who recounted how the victim was on the cusp of being a father when Schewe sold him a pill laced with fentanyl.

“His little girl missed meeting her daddy by three weeks,” Dillender reflected. “The only way she’ll get to know her daddy now is sitting on grass six feet above him.”  

After the sentencing, Dillender – who says she has to drive by her son’s grave at the Newcastle Cemetery every day on the way to work – stood on the steps of Auburn’s historic courthouse to recite the names of other young faces lost to the fentanyl epidemic in Placer.

“We had talks with our kids about drugs, and yet fentanyl still found our son – it also found Spencer, Zach, Aiden, Cole, Jacob, Jewels, Whitney, Dillon, Richie, Hailey – it is an endless list of names of our lost children,” Dillender stressed. “The landscape of experimentation has changed since what we knew before 2020. You know about fentanyl because of parents like us.”

A line of mothers and fathers stood by Dillender’s side, holding portraits of their own lost children.

Praising the detectives and prosecutors, Dillender continued, “If not for the work this county has done, many more lives would have been lost.”

Another person to speak on the courthouse steps was San Francisco Giants pitcher Logan Webb, Kade Webb’s cousin, who recently participated in an ESPN documentary about the tragedy that befell his family.

“Kade was like a brother to me, and there’s no real way to explain the devastation that the loss of a brother brings,” Logan observed. “He was one of my biggest fans. He loved coming to my games and supporting me throughout my career … When I received that call on that terrible day, I was actually preparing for the happiest day of my life – I was getting married two days later.”

Logan was briefly choked with emotion.

“But with my family’s blessing I got married,” he went on, “and a couple days later I was a pall-bearer for my cousin … I was one of the first ones on the scene that night, to find my cousin, and I will tell you, that experience, I don’t wish that on anybody … The reality is Kade was poisned and murdered. His struggle was exploited by a dealer who chose profit over people.”

The last person to speak was District Attorney Gire, who said other fentanyl dealers should pay attention to what just happened.

“This was the first murder charge for a fentanyl-related death in our county,” Gire pointed out. “Kade’s case was the first; and it illuminated the legal issues, the investigative issues, helped us look back at cases that were pending and gave us perspective. And it set this theory of liability, and this course of action, on a trajectory across the state. It was one of the first charges filed across the state. And we received, in Placer County, the first conviction for a fentanyl-related murder by plea – but it hadn’t gone to a jury. The community hadn’t weighed in directly to say, ‘Is this murder?’ It happened one other time in this state, shortly before this trial, and it happened here for the first time in this region … And as of three weeks ago, there have been four murder convictions in the state of California for fentanyl-related murders, and three of them are here in Placer.”

He added, “The stories of our bereaved parents educate our communities, but they do more than that, they ignite a fire across the DA offices, across the state, and an expectation that this will be handled this way – that these are homicides and they’ll be investigated as such.”