Back in 2023, a Powell woman was sent to prison for trying to have 10,000 fentanyl pills and a pound of meth shipped to her home. This month, her supplier in Arizona was ordered to join her in federal custody.

Lorenzo A. Santillan-Solis, a 28-year-old Phoenix resident, received over eight years of prison time for mailing the tranche of drugs to Powell.

Santillan-Solis sent the narcotics to Victoria A. Zupko in March 2023, but state and federal authorities were ready. Zupko, 28, was arrested after she collected the box and received a five-year prison sentence.

Suppliers are sometimes able to evade prosecution — investigators say they often obscure their involvement by paying in cash, using kiosks that don’t require identification and listing names that are made-up or belong to other people on their return address labels. In this case, however, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Wyoming says agents were able to use “correspondence and fingerprints” to trace the package to Santillan-Solis.

A filing in his case indicates a plastic bag from a grocery store and a piece of cellophane plastic wrap found inside the shipment contained fingerprints that matched Santillan-Solis’ right thumb.

Authorities also obtained text messages and phone calls that were consistent with drug dealing, federal prosecutors wrote in a filing, indicating they had messages between Santillan-Solis, his own suppliers and his customers.

A grand jury convened by the U.S. Attorney’s Office indicted Santillan-Solis on two felony charges in mid-May. He was arrested in Phoenix a few days later and has remained in federal custody since then, being transferred to Wyoming’s custody in late June.

Records show his court-appointed attorney Craig Silva quickly opened plea negotiations with prosecutors and they finalized a deal in October. Santillan-Solis agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and meth; prosecutors dropped a second felony count of unlawful use of a communication facility, which related to sending the drugs through the mail.

A Powell bust

Court records indicate the case dates back to November 2022, when local agents with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation learned Zupko was selling illegal narcotics from her home on Springhill Road. The agents suspected some of the drugs were arriving through the mail and a U.S. postal inspector found records showing that packages were arriving from California and Arizona.

A filing from federal prosecutors says suppliers in “known drug source areas” like Arizona generally sell bulk quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl at “substantially reduced prices.” The filing adds that, “the smaller the quantity that is sold in the destination area or city, for example, Powell, Wyoming, the higher the cost [of] the drug will be.” In this case, charging documents allege Zupko was purchasing the fentanyl pills for roughly $1 and reselling them for $60.

In March 2023, authorities say they learned a package was en route to Zupko’s home from Phoenix and grabbed the package in Casper. After a K-9 alerted to the scent of drugs, agents obtained a search warrant and reportedly found 1,068 grams of fentanyl pills and 462 grams of meth inside.

The package was emptied of the illegal drugs and delivered to Zupko, who was arrested after collecting it from her doorstep on March 21, 2023. 

Zupko indicated that roughly a quarter of the pills were hers and the remainder was being shared with other purchasers, according to charging documents.

Officers found pills and fentanyl residue scattered around Zupko’s house and within the reach of children. At her first court appearance, Zupko expressed gratitude for her arrest, suggesting it had saved her kids’ lives. When she was sentenced in the fall of 2023, Zupko took responsibility for her actions and expressed a desire to use her experience to help others, her attorney recounted at the time.

Zupko’s children were taken into protective custody following her arrest, and the Park County Department of Family Services is seeking to terminate her parental rights. In an October petition, the department wrote that “the children’s health and safety would be seriously jeopardized by returning to her care.”

Federal sentences

Records maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons say Zupko is currently being held at a minimum security prison camp in West Virginia, with a projected release date in January 2027. Once she’s out of custody, Zupko must serve three years of supervised release.

Santillan-Solis, meanwhile, has been ordered to serve 100 months in prison, followed by five years of supervised release.

At a Jan. 9 sentencing hearing in Cheyenne, U.S. District Court Judge Kelly Rankin recommended that Santillan-Solis serve his time at a low security institution in Arizona and participate in a residential drug abuse treatment program. The judge also ordered Santillan-Solis to pay a $100 assessment and $500 in community restitution to State of Wyoming divisions that serve crime victims and combat substance abuse.

Community restitution can be ordered when there is no “identifiable victim”, said Lori Hogan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office. A judge considers the amount of public harm caused by the offense, balanced with other factors, she said.