On June 18, 2020, a 31-year-old Renton man was arrested for supplying fentanyl-laced pills to a 26-year-old Bellevue woman — pills that were believed to have caused her death.

The man, Treven Blake Lane, is now being charged with controlled substance homicide.

According to charging documents, the defendant agreed to sell the victim five pills in June. Cell phone records of the defendant and victim confirm they met at a gas station on June 16, 2020. The victim ingested one and a half pills, which the King County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed tested positive for fentanyl. The victim overdosed and died.

Bellevue Police continued to investigate the defendant for this crime and performed an operation where a cooperating witness would purchase pills from the defendant.

In text messages between the defendant and the cooperating witness, the defendant said that he could not make any guarantee about the quality of the pills and confirmed that the pills may contain fentanyl, according to the charging documents.

The defendant and the cooperating witness later met and the defendant sold her the pills.

“The defendant displays a continued disregard for the safety of others by selling pills he knows are likely to contain fentanyl,” reads the document for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Law enforcement warns of an alarming increase in fentanyl-related deaths in the region. The drug is believed to be 50 times more addictive than heroin and can be lethal in minuscule amounts.

In the past five years, King County has seen a nearly 650% increase in fentanyl-related deaths. King County public health data indicates that there were only 3 fentanyl-related deaths in 2015, but recorded 175 fentanyl-related deaths in 2020 alone.

In Bellevue, there were eight fentanyl-related deaths in 2020 and eight already in 2021, according to the Bellevue Police blog.