St. Louis city prosecutors filed a drug trafficking charge this morning against a 50-year-old busted last week with fentanyl at the City Justice Center.
Prosecutors with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office filed a drug trafficking charge against Jason Gipperich, who was booked into the city jail Wednesday on a probation violation. The following day, as he was being moved from the first floor of the facility to the second, Gipperich began acting erratically, according to a police probable cause statement. A search of Gipperich turned up 20 milligrams of fentanyl.
According to the DEA, even a 2 milligram dose of the drug can be fatal.
The probation that Gipperich violated appears to be related to a 2019 attempted burglary charge, to which he pleaded guilty in 2020.
The issue of drugs in the city jail took on a renewed salience last year as the facility saw a string of detainee deaths, including three deaths in one six-week span.
Since November 2020, at least three deaths at the jail have been of men confirmed to have had fentanyl in their systems. A KSDK investigation found that in a single month last year, EMS services were called to the jail eight times to respond to overdoses.
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