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A former Rice University football player is now facing federal drug charges in the death of a teammate who took a fatal dose of the opioid carfentanil.
Stuart Mouchantaf, 26, of Katy, known as “Mooch,” was taken into federal custody Thursday and is expected to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Bray Friday on allegations he gave a fatal dose of a tranquilizer used on elephants to Blain Padgett in March 2018
Federal prosecutors say Mouchantaf conspired to distribute and possessed with the intent to distribute the powerful opioid derivative on Rice University’s campus one day before Padgett’s body was discovered by teammates when he missed a morning practice.
Attorney Lisa Andrews, who represented Mouchantaf on the state court charges, had no comment about the move to federal court, according to an assistant in her office.
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Padgett was a star player at Rice who hoped to make it into the National Football League, according to court documents.
On Thursday night, his mother said she hopes the higher profile of a federal courtroom will bring more attention to the scourge of opioid addiction and black market drugs.
“We really want to get the message out there to young adults who might be in the same situation Blain was in,” Wyndi Marsh Padgett told The Beaumont Enterprise.
She called the news “bittersweet” because it dredges up the pain of her son’s death but raises hopes that someone will be “held accountable.” She and her husband plan to drive to Houston to attend Mouchantaf’s initial court hearing.
“The judge needs to see us, and Stuart needs to see us,” she said of her son’s former teammate. ” … For Blain’s sake, we need to be there.”
Harris County narcotics officials previously said Padgett apparently bought the pills believing they were hydrocodone,a prescription painkiller. One teammate told county investigators that he saw Padgett standing outside the doors of the Sports Performance Center on March 1, 2018, and that Padgett said he was waiting for Mooch, “to buy some hydros,” according to court records.
Padgett took two pills that contained carfentanil, which is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Mouchantaf told investigators he saw Padgett on March 1 and gave him four or five “hydros,” according to a prosecutor at Mouchantaf’s probable cause hearing last fall.
Mouchantaf who is 6-foot-3 and 290 pounds, played defensive tackle on the Rice team with Padgett, but was sidelined in 2013 with a knee injury. Mouchantaf also missed the 2014 season after reaggravating the injury.
Federal prosecutors may have elevated the case to U.S. district court in hopes of identifying the distributor who concocted the lethal dosage that killed Padgett, said Sean Buckley, a veteran federal criminal defense lawyer who is not connected to the case.
“The feds are very good at building cases through cooperation,” Buckley said. “If the feds want to climb up the roots of the vine this is how they would do it — prosecute him, get him to flip about how he got the stuff and then keep moving up the chain to get to the source whether that be the importer or the manufacturer.”
Ronnie Crocker contributed to this report