29-year-old dies from fentanyl overdose in Sandoval County Detention Center

May 29 was supposed to be the day Breanna Esparza returned to her clean, sober life.

Instead, Esparza, a 29-year-old mother, was found dead around 3 a.m. on the floor of a jail cell from a fentanyl overdose while in custody at the Sandoval County Detention Center.

The loss of Esparza due to fentanyl addiction hit close to home for Sean Roberts and Gary Gamoba, co-founders of Rio Rancho’s Desert Mountain Healing, an intensive outpatient drug and alcohol treatment program where Esparza was a client working on her drug addiction.

Roberts and Gamboa have seen hundreds of clients since opening Desert Mountain Healing in April 2022, but Esparza was one-of-a-kind.

“Breanna was actually a lot of fun to have in here. She lit up the room every time she walked in. She very rapidly became almost everybody's best friend,” Roberts said. “She was always willing to reach out and try to help, and it's a real shame that she had to die in jail from an overdose. That, to me, is the most frustrating part of this whole thing.”

Esparza was arrested May 9 by the Rio Rancho Police Department for a probation violation. According to court records, Esparza was in possession of suboxone, a controlled substance used to treat narcotic (opiate) addiction.

According to Harvard Medical School, “Suboxone, a combination medication containing buprenorphine and naloxone, is one of the main medications used to treat opioid addiction. Using 'medications for opioid use disorder' is known as MOUD. Use of MOUD has been shown to lower the risk of fatal overdoses by approximately 50%. It also reduces the risk of nonfatal overdoses, which are traumatic and medically dangerous."

“They came to her room that day; she had gone to pick up her son from school, and they found some Suboxone in her room, and they went and called it paraphernalia,” Breanna’s mother, Evelyn Esparza, said. “It was a prescription that they had given her, but she didn't want to take it. She was afraid of withdrawals. She said, ‘I don't want to go through withdrawals. I'm going to do it on my own.”’

Suboxone, like any opiate, and many other medications, can be misused. However, because it is only a "partial" agonist of the main opiate receptor (the "mu" receptor), it causes much less euphoria than the other opiates such as heroin and oxycodone. In many cases, people may use Suboxone (or "misuse" it, if that is defined as using it illegally) to help themselves manage their withdrawal, or even to get themselves off heroin or fentanyl.”

While Suboxone can be abused, there were no signs Esparza was taking it improperly.

“She never ever got extra Suboxone here. She always tested at the normal levels we'd expect,” Roberts said. “If she could take her Suboxone that she was prescribed and tried to sell those, we'd see her levels drop, and we never saw her levels drop. They were always consistent. Suboxone can be abused as a narcotic if you don't regulate it, but she wasn't doing that. We didn't see any signs of her abusing Suboxone herself. We run (urine analysis) on the clients, and we can literally track the amount that they're taking or not taking by us.”

Esparza spent 20 days in jail and was set to be released 12 hours after she was found dead.

When asked about Esparza’s death, Sandoval County officials provided the following statement:

“Sandoval County Detention Center works to protect its staff and detainees to the best of its ability by following the law and using best practices in combination with technology to create and maintain a safe environment for everyone.”

Sandoval County said Esparza is just the second confirmed overdose death in the detention center during the six years of Warden Gilbert Armendariz’s tenure. The county also said, “It is assumed that she got the drug from another detainee” and there are several protocols in place to prevent this from happening.

According to Sandoval County, anyone entering the facility (employee, detainee, or public) must go through the body scanner. If an anomaly presents on the scan, the detainee is patted down, and if determined necessary, that detainee is dry-celled (isolated from the general population) and in line of sight of a correctional officer for a prescribed amount of time. Sandoval County Detention Center has between 5,000-8,000 bookings per year.

“A lot of the people that come to the jail are not in the healthiest of conditions. They have addiction problems, they have behavioral health problems, they've got issues that led them to be in jail in the first place,” Sandoval County Manager Wayne Johnson said. “We do our absolute best to take good care of each one of those prisoners while they're with us. I think we're doing a pretty good job when it comes to taking care of those folks that we’re entrusted with.”

Sandoval County offers several programs for drug addicts who are in custody.

The Medication Assisted Treatment program allows detainees with a prescription for Suboxone to have their medication administered by a medical professional. This program is managed by a third-party medical group. Detainees have access to a mental health counselor. Narcotics Anonymous programs are also available at the detention center. The detention center also offers group therapy for detainees with substance abuse issues, and detainees receive referrals for continued counseling when they’re released.

Esparza had struggled with drug addiction for years but had been working with Desert Mountain for nearly six months to get clean.

“It's devastating when we lose a client ,and beyond being just personally devastating for Gary and I, especially with somebody like Breanna, who was so well loved amongst all of our clients,” Roberts said. “It really makes it even harder because then we almost have to put our regular treatment routine on hold and deal with the grief and deal with the trauma and deal with everything that all the clients are feeling towards it. It just makes it more difficult for everybody here, the clients as well as the staff.”

“For me, everybody that walks through the door, you're always rooting for them, you're the biggest cheerleader — I am anyway,” Gamboa said. “But you always have that one, maybe two people who walk through the door, and they just have a special place in your heart. Breanna was that for me. She got in the program and she just did everything we asked her to do.”

Esparza recently got a new job and actually began referring people she knew who needed help to the program. As her new, sober life was just getting started, it all came to an end because of fentanyl.

“The lesson from this is how deadly fentanyl really is and how this disease can just sneak up on you when you least expect it,” Roberts said.

“When you are succeeding like Breanna was and and you're really making headway in your recovery and your family and your parents are starting to come together, you're starting to spend time with your little son, which she had, it's starting to look good,” Gamboa said. “And then all of a sudden, a little blurb and you get thrown in jail. It's just such a low; for an addict it is the lowest of lows.”

Evelyn Esparza said her daughter Breanna was a kind-hearted animal lover.

“She was always trying to help out people. She used to make sandwiches and go feed the homeless. She brought me two dogs that were being neglected,” Esparza said. “I have them now. She brought me them when they were puppies. I didn't want any more animals, but we took him in. She said, ‘Mom, they’re being neglected.’ She just helped everybody.”

While the death of a 29-year-old is always tragic, it hit the Esparza family especially hard because of all the progress Breanna had been making recently.

“She was doing so good for the past 10 months; she was keeping up with everything they told her because she was in drug court and she was getting tested four times a week,” Esparza said. “She was doing so good; she had a job and she bought a car. She was so happy.”

Now the Esparza family is left with nothing but memories of Breanna and questions about why she died.

“She had been clean so I don't understand. If she was getting out that day, why she would have even done drugs?” Evelyn Esparza said. “It's very hard for me, because she was doing so good. She was back home. She was so happy, getting so close to her son and to me. We did a lot of things together, at least for the past six months before she passed away, and I was so happy. I never, ever thought this was going to happen to her. Maybe she was a drug addict, but she was my daughter, and I loved her. She had a son that loved her very much. He's 12 years old, and now he doesn't have a mother.”

As the Esparzas struggle with Breanna’s death, Evelyn wants to make sure no family has to endure what her family is going through right now.

“Love them no matter what. It's a really bad addiction,” she said. “I tried everything to help her so many times. I gave her 100%. But my advice is just love them no matter what and be there for them.”