Police arrested two men Friday morning in connection with the rape and fatal overdose of a teenage Dallas girl, marking the fourth time that North Texas authorities have accused someone of providing "cheese" heroin that caused a death.
"It's one thing to take drugs yourself, but it's even worse when you provide it to a minor," said Sgt. Warren Mitchell, a Dallas police spokesman.
Eddie Zepeda, 20, was being held without bail at the Dallas County Jail on two counts of sexual assault of a child and delivery of a controlled substance to a minor resulting in death. Samuel Moncada, 24, was being held on $500,000 bail on two counts of sexual assault of a child.
Police and the girl's family requested that her name be withheld because she was a minor who was sexually assaulted. Her death in January was one of two cheese overdoses that occurred within days of each other in Dallas.
Cheese heroin, a combination of nighttime cold medicine and Mexican black tar heroin, has claimed the lives of at least 32 people 18 or younger in Dallas County since 2005, according to an ongoing analysis by The Dallas Morning News.
"Nobody forced her," Diego Moncada, Samuel's 21-year-old brother, said Friday outside the family's home. "It was an accident."
The mother of both men, who was also home Friday, did not comment.
Diego Moncada, who has not been charged in the case, called 911 the morning that he and his brother found the girl lying on the floor of their home near Love Field. She was already cold, he told the operator.
When police arrived, they saw nude pictures of the girl on Samuel Moncada's cellphone, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Officers gave the phone back to him, but when they doubled back to collect it for evidence, the pictures had been erased, police said.
Police say Zepeda brought the girl to the Moncada residence the previous afternoon. He and Samuel Moncada sat in Zepeda's 1997 Honda Civic with her, drinking beer.
Police believe that Zepeda also had a plate in the car loaded with heroin, crushed cold tablets and cocaine, and that the girl snorted the drugs.
Detectives later found a plate under the driver's seat with traces of cheese heroin and cocaine on it.
An autopsy found that the girl had been raped. She also had contusions on her head and both legs, including her knee, thigh and ankle, the arrest affidavit states.
Investigators believe that after both Zepeda and Samuel Moncada had sex with the girl in the car, they dragged her into the house and dressed her there. She was found with her school uniform pants buttoned, but half off. The shoulder of her white shirt was stained with dirt, the affidavit says.
Those living in the neighborhoods around Love Field are organizing a solidarity march against cheese heroin on July 17. The march – "in memory of our lost children" – starts at Overlake Park at 5 p.m. For more information, check events at
www.mylovefield .com.
The case is the fourth time that local authorities have filed charges against someone for providing cheese heroin that resulted in a death.
• A Rockwall County judge in May sentenced Tim Salahi, 20, to six months in state jail for causing the death of 16-year-old Paige Elliott. She overdosed in September 2007 at Salahi's home in Rockwall from a mixture of cheese, Ecstasy, Xanax, cocaine and marijuana.
• In May 2008, DeLeon Vanegas Jr., 21, of Dallas was sentenced to 18 years in prison for giving cheese to his girlfriend's 15-year-old brother, Fernando Cortez Jr., who died in March 2007 within hours of snorting the drug.
• In January 2008, Irving police announced that they were charging Michael Anthony Puente, 20, and Victor Tellez, 21, with murder in the September 2007 overdose death of 16-year-old Ana Rojas. Their trial is scheduled for later this year.
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