A judge in Summit County has ordered a Chinese-based organized crime group to pay an Akron family $18 million in damages for the 2015 overdose death of their son.
“He was a big dreamer and a hard worker and a really great person,” Jim Rauh said of his son Tom.
A month before Tom died, prosecutors say the man who was convicted of selling him the deadly drug was in contact with a group in China, seeking the supply of the acetyl fentanyl, a synthetic opioid several times stronger than heroin.In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions unsealed a 43-count indictment of several members of the Shanghai-based Zheng family for their role.
Eight years after his son’s death, a judge sided with the Rauh family and ordered the Zheng group to pay $18 million in damages. The defendants failed to respond to the lawsuit or appear in court, so the judge granted default judgment on the case. Andrew Pollis, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, agreed that seeking damages from an international criminal organization will be challenging, but he said the action in court could serve to raise awareness and as a deterrent for would-be drug traffickers stateside.
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