A 26-year-old Massachusetts man has pleaded guilty to selling fentanyl on two occasions in 2017 including to a St. George man who later died of an overdose.
Cameron Soto of Fairhaven, Mass., entered guilty pleas in U.S. District Court in Portland on June 13 to two counts of distribution of fentanyl.
The plea agreement reached between the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Soto’s defense attorneys calls for a prison sentence of between 18 and 24 years. He could have faced a life sentence for the drug death.
A sentencing date has not been scheduled but will be held after a pre-sentence report is compiled by the U.S. Probation Office.
Soto will also serve six years of supervision upon his release from prison and could be fined up to $2 million under the agreement with federal prosecutors.
Soto has been held in jail since his arrest in March 2017.
The case was investigated by the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office and Rockland Police Department, with assistance from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Soto and Trevor Teves, 18, were stopped and arrested March 15, 2017, in the parking lot of Town Line Market in Warren after Soto sold drugs in St. George to a confidential informant, according to an affidavit filed in court by the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency.
Teves was charged with possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and released on bail. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in prison.
Soto had been released from the Maine State Prison in Warren on Dec. 30, 2016. He had been sentenced in September 2014 in Knox County to three years in prison for dealing crack cocaine in December 2013 in Rockland. Soto also had a drug conviction in Massachusetts in 2012.
According to an affidavit filed in Knox County court by the MDEA, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office responded a day before the March 15 undercover drug transaction to a residence on Ridge Road in St. George, where 48-year-old Edward Rogers died after injecting heroin and fentanyl. Soto and Teves also had been staying at a nearby residence on Ridge Road, and cellphone records linked Soto to Rogers, according to police.
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