BOONSBORO -- Laureen Angle tried to save her son.
She drove him to substance abuse counseling after his drunken-driving arrest at 16. She noticed when he was skipping school in this Western Maryland town and called him on it. She even wrote to the judge, asking for help after the court-ordered intervention programs failed to stop his drinking and pot smoking.
The mother of three lost her battle in late July when 17-year-old Harry L. "Trey" Angle died in his sleep from a fatal combination of alcohol and methadone - a drug prescribed for heroin addiction that she never knew he was abusing.
But this week, Laureen Angle and her grieving family found some hope in an announcement that federal prosecutors in Baltimore had charged two people with supplying Trey the prescription medication that killed him.
U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein, the state's top federal prosecutor, said the indictment was only the second such case in Maryland since the early 1990s in which a suspected drug dealer has been charged with a federal crime based on the death of a drug user.
Despite the hundreds of overdose deaths in the state every year, filing the charge is rare, according to federal authorities. It can be difficult, they said, to link a drug-induced death directly back to the specific supplier who sold the fatal dose.
"I thank God that it was transferred from the county to the state to the federal level," Angle said. "I was thrilled that they were going after them for Trey's death."
A grand jury indicted Robert Carroll Eichelberger, 36, of Hagerstown, and Kathleen Ann Harris, 38, of Olney, on drug-trafficking charges in the distribution of methadone, oxycodone and hydrocodone in Western Maryland to high school students.
"This law was designed for a case just like this," said Rosenstein, whose office is leading the prosecution.
If convicted of the death-related charge, each defendant faces a minimum of 20 years in prison.
According to the four-count indictment returned Sept. 25 and announced Monday, Eichelberger and Harris worked together since the start of the year to distribute prescription-only medication - methadone, oxycodone and hydrocodone. Eichelberger is also charged with one count of distributing the painkiller Percocet on Sept. 13 and one count of distributing methadone on Sept. 14.
