A Mount Airy man was convicted Thursday for his small role in trafficking large amounts of the hallucinatory drug LSD to middle and high school students in Davie and Forsyth counties.
The man, 25-year-old Dylan Tyler Beck, was the last remaining defendant charged in a wide-ranging investigation involving multiple law-enforcement agencies that crossed three different states — North Carolina, South Carolina and Colorado.
Beck, 25, pleaded guilty Thursday in Forsyth Superior Court to one count of possession with intent to sell and deliver LSD. As part of the plea deal, John Bandle, an assistant district attorney for Davie County, voluntarily dismissed two counts of drug trafficking against Beck.
Judge William Long of Forsyth Superior Court sentenced Beck to four to 14 months in prison. Beck will get credit for time he served while awaiting trial. He will likely be released within the next day or so because he has already served more time in jail than the imposed sentence.
People are also reading…
Bandle said in court that Beck was the least culpable defendant in a case that ensnared a total of five people. The four other co-defendants — Ronald Williams, Marco Sevilla-Hernandez, Christopher Dustin Owens and Branden Hall — have all pleaded guilty and been sentenced.
The investigation started in the fall of 2018. Then-Detective Larry “Matt” Leonard of the Mocksville Police Department, which has since closed, found out that someone was selling LSD in and around Mocksville.
Leonard went undercover and identified Owens as a mid-level LSD dealer who was operating out of Lancaster, South Carolina. On Jan. 4, 2019, Owens was arrested as part of what law-enforcement called Operation Electric Kool-Aid, according to court documents. When Owens was arrested, law-enforcement didn’t know exactly where the large amount of LSD, which was estimated to be more than 100,000 units, was coming from, court documents said.
Owens started talking to investigators and agreed to point them in the right direction. He provided hours of recorded testimony that led law-enforcement officers to the manufacturer of the LSD. Owens told investigators how often he sold LSD and the “nature of the LSD sales that occurred to individuals down the distribution chain,” court papers said.
The investigation led to Ronald Williams, a Colorado man, who was identified as the source of the drugs. According to Owens, Williams shipped LSD from Colorado to South Carolina. Owens would pick up the LSD and sell it to Sevilla-Hernandez.
The prosecution said Leonard bought LSD from Sevilla-Hernandez several times. On Jan. 4, 2019, Leonard bought a large amount of LSD from Sevilla-Hernandez, who told Leonard to bring the money to his house and that Sevilla-Hernandez would travel to South Carolina to pick up the LSD, according to an affidavit for a search warrant. Leonard said he ultimately bought 2,900 “dosage units” of LSD from Sevilla-Hernandez.
Beck drove Sevilla-Hernandez and had possession of 300 dosage units of LSD, according to Bandle.
Williams pleaded guilty in December 2020 to one count of conspiracy to traffic in LSD and was sentenced to a minimum of five years, 10 months in prison. Owens pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to traffic in LSD and was sentenced to a minimum of four years in prison.
Sevilla-Hernandez was sentenced to a minimum of five years, 10 months in prison. And Hall was sentenced to a minimum of 2 years, 9 months in prison.
Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter
Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email.
