At least three men, all Black, allegedly overdosed in Buck’s apartment with drugs he gave to them.
Two of them, Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean, died there.
Tuesday’s indictment added intentionally distributing drugs, two counts of enticing men to cross state lines to engage in prostitution, and using his apartment to dispense drugs to the charges Buck already faces.
In all, he’s charged with nine crimes and faces life in prison if convicted.
He was arrested in September 2019, and his federal trial is scheduled for January 2021. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office has also charged him with using his apartment to distribute drugs. He faces charges from the state of California and civil suits filed by victims as well. Victims’ family members have said authorities ignored their relatives’ cases because the men were poor, queer, and Black, with Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey singled out in particular. Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon, said she had identified and interviewed seven men who endured meth injections from Buck and presented them to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, but, according to Nixon’s lawsuit against Buck and Lacey, the sheriff’s office ignored them. The accounts of these men appear as supporting evidence in the federal indictments against Buck. One alleged victim referred to him as “Dr. Jasmyne Cannick, an attorney representing Moore’s family, said in a statement, “The additional indictments against Ed Buck just further prove that the men who came forward and told their stories of the white man in West Hollywood who loved to inject Black men with meth were true.” Kevorkian,” the physician whose name has become a stand-in for assisted suicide. “We’re happy that the Department of Justice is taking this case seriously,” she continued. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s failure to take action against Ed Buck. Jackie Lacey's failure to take the accounts of Black gay men seriously is the reason that Timothy Dean is dead.”Īsked last year how she felt when Buck had been arrested, Moore’s mother LaTisha Nixon said, “I felt-finally. We had been screaming for so long and no one listened. Hussain Turk, who represents Dean’s sisters, previously told The Daily Beast, “The reason why we believe police did nothing with these reports is because of the races and sexual orientations of the victims-they’re Black, gay, homeless, and people who are the most vulnerable of our society. The police don’t view them as valid witnesses.“That’s what happens when you start smoking meth - people repossess your cows,” says Chuck Allen, chief of the Granite Falls police force and one of the dozen or so cops and Snohomish County deputies buzzing around the grounds. In the five years since methamphetamine entrenched itself in this former logging town north of Seattle, Allen’s work life has consisted of responding to one outrage after another, each more numbing than the last. The month before, there were the tweakers (as meth users are known) who clubbed to death 17 newborn calves. Before that, it was the boy, high out of his mind, who fancied his thick skull bulletproof and blew much of it off with a. Like no drug before it - not crack, coke, Ecstasy or smack - meth has so swamped this rural community that it has largely come to define it.