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“This is the first time in the borough of Queens an admitted drug dealer has been held criminally responsible for the deaths of people who died after taking the poison he supplied to them,” DA Katz said.
By Michael V. Cusenza
After pleading guilty in November to criminally negligent homicide and drug possession in separate incidents resulting in the deaths of his girlfriend and a male acquaintance, a Great Neck, LI, heroin dealer has been sentenced to up to six years in prison, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced Thursday.
Justin Lum, 31, was officially sentenced on Thursday morning to an indeterminate term of three to six years in prison.
According to court records, on April 27, 2017, Lum provided heroin to his girlfriend, Brooklyn resident
Patricia Collado, while the two of them watched a movie at a College Point theater. After leaving the moviehouse, they again used heroin supplied by Lum inside a parked car. The 28-year-old woman suddenly stopped speaking and lost consciousness. Lum sought help and pulled Collado from the vehicle at 56th Avenue and Main Street, where first responders administered Naloxone to the woman and transported her to a nearby hospital.
Lum stayed at the hospital with the victim until she was discharged shortly after 11 p.m., when the couple went to Lum’s grandfather’s house in Flushing. There, the pair again snorted heroin supplied by Lum, and Collado abruptly went into cardiac arrest. This time, however, the defendant did not call for medical attention, nor did he attempt to provide her with medical care. For an hour, while
Collado needed medical aid, Lum continued to use drugs and then fell asleep.
Sometime after 8 a.m. the next morning, Lum woke up to find the victim beside him unconscious. Only then did he call 911 and administer CPR per the instructions of the medical dispatcher on the phone. Collado was dead when emergency medical technicians arrived. An autopsy showed she died from acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine.
According to the charges, in March 2018, Lum sold heroin to Calvin Brown, who lived in Bayside. Brown was inside Lum’s residence on March 1, 2018, when he took the drugs Lum gave him and immediately had a medical emergency. The defendant called 911 and gave the 24-year-old man CPR until first responders got there. Brown was taken to an area hospital for treatment and survived.
Brown was discharged from the hospital on March 6, 2018. Three days later, on March
9, the victim returned to Lum’s home and bought more heroin from the defendant. The next day, Brown was found dead, by his mother, in their Bayside home. An autopsy performed on Brown revealed the cause of death to be acute intoxication from the combined effects of heroin, alprazolam (Xanax), diazepam and phenobarbital.
“The defendant in this case is going to prison after pleading guilty in the overdose deaths of two people he supplied with heroin. One of those deadly doses of heroin was laced with fentanyl. The defendant provided drugs to these two victims despite knowing both had nearly died before of drug overdoses,” Katz added. “This is the first time in the borough of Queens an admitted drug dealer has been held criminally responsible for the deaths of people who died after taking the poison he supplied to them.”
