The drugs behind the death

She lived in a two-story farmhouse in rural Carroll County, and that's where a neighbor discovered the body of 31-year old Stacie Tasker face down in a toilet with a syringe laying on the floor next to her right hand.
    
According to charging documents, the neighbor had become suspicious when she spotted the victim's four-year-old daughter walking around unsupervised outside the home, and when she asked where her mother was, she responded, "She's upstairs at the toilet, and she's dead." 
    
The case, like so many others, could have ended there, but investigators spent the next five months tracking heroin and fentanyl found at the scene back to 25-year old Britni Fodor.
    
Using witness testimony and cell phone records, investigators determined Fodor and her boyfriend, the victim's nephew, would routinely travel to West Baltimore to purchase drugs from a narcotics supplier.
    
In the month proceeding her death, Tasker and Fodor had exchanged more than 600 text messages, allegedly making arrangements before and after drug transactions and to arrange for payment.
    
Court records suggest on the night before Tasker's body was discovered, she and Fodor contacted each other repeatedly, including 18 times in what may have been her final hour before her death, and once the suspect returned to her home in Pennsylvania, she never returned to Maryland again.
    
Fodor now faces a series of charges including drug possession and distribution that could carry a total of up to 44 years behind bars.