A former employee at a Walmart in Washington state recently fired for attempted theft was arrested after returning to the store for his “stash of heroin and Xanax.”
The former employee, an unidentified 24-year-old, was fired for trying to steal a safe from the store a few days before the incident. He called the store after he was let go to inform staff he would be coming to pick up the same safe, which he said he “forgot,” prompting staff to open the safe, where they discovered a yellow container with powder and pills inside, reports WREG.
When arriving at the Walmart he told employees he left his “medication” in the safe, at which point workers called officers with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.
“When deputies arrived the man started crying; he told the deputies the safe was his, and the yellow container and narcotics were his,” said a representative of the sheriff’s department, according to WREG. “He went on to say that he paid $350 for them.”
The unidentified man faces a charge of unlawful possession of a controlled substance and is currently booked at Pierce County Jail.
Washington state is being ravaged by opioid abuse and addiction. The state loses roughly two residents each day from an opioid overdose, whether from prescriptions pills or street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Opioid overdoses made up a staggering 66 percent of all drug overdose deaths last year, killing 42,249 people in 2016, surpassing the annual number of lives lost to breast cancer. Deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, a painkiller roughly 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, experienced a particularly dramatic increase, more than doubling from 9,580 lives in 2015 to 19,413 lives last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationally, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under age 50, killing more than 64,000 people in 2016.
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