A California mother is speaking out against President Donald Trump’s pardon of the man convicted in her son’s overdose death from drugs purchased from what prosecutors have called the “sprawling black-market bazaar” Silk Road.
“Where’s the justice?” Dorine Núñez Ávila told The Washington Post on Wednesday days after Trump issued a full pardon to Ross William Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence after he was convicted in 2015 on seven counts, including distributing narcotics and money laundering.
Núñez Ávila’s son, Alejandro, is one of at least six others who died on drugs purchased on Silk Road, the Post reported. Ulbricht operated the now-defunct site as a hidden service that sold millions of dollars of narcotics and other illegal products and services, authorities said.
Núñez Ávila’s son “took four hits of 25I-NBOMe” on the night he died in 2012, which were ordered from the site before being sold to him, according to the Post. She’s now harshly criticizing Trump’s pardon of Ulbricht “as hypocritical,” the publication said.
“He talks about immigrants coming here to the States, bringing drugs to the U.S., but yet he pardons this individual that was sentenced for life in prison back in 2015,” Núñez Ávila said. “I really don’t understand.”
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She added that she strongly believes “that individuals who are involved in distributing illegal drugs should be in prison forever,” adding: “These people should not be out here. They’re dangerous.”
The pardon, which Trump announced on his Truth Social platform, came as part of a promise he made to the Libertarian Party on the campaign trail last year. In the post, Trump said it was his “pleasure” to sign the pardon and called prosecutors that worked on Ulbricht’s case “scum.”
When news of Trump’s pardon reached Núñez Ávila, she said she first wondered what was being done for those affected by Silk Road, telling the Post that Ulbricht “broke up a lot of families.”
“Our family is broken,” she told the publication. “Our life has not been the same since Alejandro left 12, 13 years ago, and it will never be the same.”