A North Pole woman was sentenced to 21 years in prison Wednesday for selling drugs that led to a man’s fatal fentanyl overdose in 2022, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon.
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Sentencing memos filed last week show federal prosecutors and the defense jointly recommended a slightly lighter sentence of 20 years for 39-year-old Samantha Pearson. She pleaded guilty in March to one count of felony conspiracy to distribute controlled substances that resulted in death.
Pearson admitted to selling the drugs that killed 32-year-old Adam Sakkinen in June 2022. He was found passed out in his car in North Pole, less than a half-hour after buying the drugs from Pearson. Investigators said they found paraphernalia in the car that tested positive for fentanyl. Pearson said she believed she was selling heroin.
Medics administered six doses of Narcan, and Sakkinen regained a pulse. According to federal prosecutors’ sentencing memo, he had about 2.5 times the average lethal dose of fentanyl in his bloodstream. The memo says he spent 11 days in intensive care before his family “made the heartbreaking decision to take him off life support.”
Pearson was arrested and charged under state criminal statute, including manslaughter, in 2022, and indicted in federal court in 2024.
Her co-defendant, 40-year-old Edward Ginnis, was accused of supplying the drugs Pearson sold and pleaded guilty last year to the same federal charge as Pearson, receiving a sentence of 22 years in prison. The two are connected to a much larger drug trafficking ring allegedly led by Heraclio Sanchez-Rodriguez, an inmate serving a life sentence in a California prison, according to court documents.
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The July 28 sentencing memo from Pearson’s attorneys downplayed her role compared to Ginnis. It describes him as an “enforcer.”
“Unlike Mr. Ginnis, Ms. Pearson had an extremely minor role in the overall Sanchez-Rodriguez DTO (drug trafficking organization),” the memo says. “Ms. Pearson distributed small drug quantities, user amounts, on a limited number of occasions.”
After agreeing to sell the drugs, another user had made Pearson aware that the substance she was dealing in the leadup to Sakkinen’s death was dangerous, but that she did so anyway, the prosecutors’ July 28 memo says.
That decision resulted “in a completely avoidable tragedy that forever changed the lives of the victim’s family and friends who now live each day with a hole in their lives where he used to be,” federal prosecutors wrote.
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