The Sheriff Took Out the Scanners. Five Days Later, Anahi Rubio Was Dead.

Anahi Rubio was 23 when Maricopa County deputies arrested her on September 9, 2025, on charges of drug possession, trespassing, and obstruction. Five days later, guards found her unresponsive in her cell. The medical examiner’s report would eventually list the cause of death as fentanyl and methamphetamine intoxication — inside a locked facility, under guard, five days after she’d lost every ordinary way to buy drugs on the street. “How did she get a hold of those drugs in there,” her mother, Carolina Lopez, asked afterward. “How?” Her brother, Jose Rubio, remembers her differently than the booking sheet does: “She was making big changes for herself. It hits every day.”

Here is the sentence Maricopa County needs to sit with: the jail is supposed to be the one place in Arizona’s fentanyl era where nobody dies from a drug they weren’t supposed to have. It has become one of the more dangerous places to be dope-sick in the entire state.

Drug-related deaths inside Maricopa County jails climbed from 12 in 2024 to 21 in 2025 — a 75 percent increase — in Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s first full year in office. ABC15’s broader count of all in-custody deaths — not just the ones confirmed drug-related — puts the jump at 27 to 39. Two different agencies counting two overlapping things arrive at the same shape: more people are dying inside these walls than at any point in recent memory, and it is happening at the exact moment Sheridan chose to remove the security scanners that screened jail employees for contraband on their way into work.

The decision nobody in the building can explain away

Sheridan pulled the employee scanners early in his term. He has never fully explained why beyond cost and logistics, and his office did not reverse the decision even as deaths climbed through 2025. When pressed, he defended his staff instead: “We hire the best people… their integrity is not a question.” He argues “the vast majority of drugs come in through the body cavities from people off the street” — meaning incoming detainees, not his own staff — and that fentanyl powder in particular is “easier to conceal and easier to transport” than it used to be.

That may all be true. It also isn’t an argument for removing the one system built to test it. If staff integrity truly isn’t in question, a scanner proves that every single shift, for free, forever. Instead, Maricopa County is left asking families like the Rubios and the Sassers to simply trust that the pipeline runs only one direction — through the people already in custody, never through the door marked “employees only” — precisely as the body count disproving that trust keeps rising. Kiethsa Sasser, 29, died of an overdose inside Estrella Jail on August 14, 2024. Her sister, Jessica Johnson, has spent the year since showing up outside the jail to say her name. “It shows me that our system is broken,” Johnson said, “and that we need change.” Deputy Chief Brandon Smith points to a different fix — new inmate-facing body scanners, installed in July 2024, that have caught seven people carrying drugs since — as evidence the office is responding. Both things are true at once: the county built a scanner for the population it was already blaming, and removed the one that would have tested the population it wasn’t.

Sheridan says every death is personal to him. “Those inmates in custody are my responsibility ultimately,” he has said. “I take every death very personally.” Responsibility and an unstaffed scanner checkpoint are not the same commitment.

Arizona was already the exception nobody wanted

Zoom out from the jail and the pattern gets worse, not better. The country, on paper, is having a good year. CDC’s provisional 2025 data, released July 2, show the U.S. age-adjusted death rate falling to 689.2 per 100,000 — a record low, driven in real part by a continued national decline in overdose deaths. If you only read the national number, you’d think the worst of the fentanyl era was finally, unmistakably, behind us.

age-adjusted death rate falling to 689.2 per 100,000 — a record low, driven in real part by a continued national decline in overdose deaths.

Arizona’s own public health researchers looked at their state’s numbers and came to the opposite conclusion. A June report from the Arizona Public Health Association, authored by epidemiologist Allan Williams, found Arizona overdose deaths rose 18 percent in 2025 — from 2,531 to 2,988 — in the same twelve months the national count fell 14 percent. Synthetic-opioid deaths in Arizona were up roughly 33 percent. Deaths involving methamphetamine and other stimulants rose more than 15 percent. Cocaine deaths jumped nearly 70 percent. Every other line on the national chart is bending down. Arizona’s is bending up, alone.

A jail system inside that state, run by an office that just removed a contraband checkpoint, is not an outlier inside an outlier. It’s the same failure, concentrated. If you want to know what an eighteen-percent increase actually looks like at ground level, it looks like Anahi Rubio’s cell.

What withdrawal actually does to a body behind bars — and why we’ve seen this policy fight before

Here’s the part county officials rarely say out loud: for a lot of people booked into Maricopa’s jails, the crisis isn’t only that drugs get in. It’s what happens to the ones who don’t get any — the ones going through withdrawal from an adulterated opioid supply that increasingly includes medetomidine, a veterinary sedative strong enough that stopping it cold can trigger a stroke or a heart attack within hours. CDC’s April health alert tracked medetomidine lab detections rocketing from 247 in 2023 to 8,233 in 2025, almost always riding alongside fentanyl. A STAT News investigation into jails nationwide found fewer than half offer medications for opioid use disorder at all, and federal Medicaid is barred by law from paying for incarcerated people’s medications — leaving county budgets to cover a medical crisis the federal government designed a funding gap around. “It’s very difficult for them to finance this care,” researcher Marcella Alsan told STAT, “and yet they’re constitutionally obligated.”

If you have ever done time and watched someone dope-sick in the bunk above you, shaking through a withdrawal nobody in the building was trained to treat as an emergency, you already know the county doesn’t file that under crisis. It files it under Tuesday.

We have watched the federal government defund the exact tool that would have made a moment like Anahi Rubio’s more survivable before. In 1988, Congress banned the use of federal funds for the syringe-exchange programs that were slowing the spread of HIV among people who inject drugs — a ban that, with brief exceptions, held for more than two decades while the disease spread through the population it was supposed to protect. That’s the shape repeating right now: a SAMHSA letter dated April 24 barred grant recipients from spending federal money on fentanyl, xylazine, or medetomidine test strips, or on overdose support hotlines — reversing guidance issued just a year earlier that had called drug-checking a life-saving tool. Law enforcement’s own drug-testing technology was exempted. Only the tools that keep users alive got cut.

If you run a treatment or reentry program that touches justice-involved clients, this week is the week to ask your county jail’s health contractor a direct question: does MOUD induction start before release, or only after? CDC’s own alert names the gap. It is a one-email ask, and it is the difference between someone walking out already stabilized and someone walking out into the same supply that almost killed them behind bars.

The money already exists. It just isn’t reaching the cells.

None of this is happening in a state without resources. Arizona’s Attorney General announced $10 million in opioid settlement funds in June — $2 million each to five rural county sheriffs — explicitly to fund reentry programs that help people transition out of incarceration. “These funds will help county sheriffs expand programs that give Arizonans a real shot at recovery, stability, and a second chance,” AG Kris Mayes said. That’s a real, meaningful investment, and it’s aimed at exactly the right population. It is also aimed entirely at the moment people leave custody — not the moment, five days into a sentence, when they’re still inside it. Maricopa isn’t one of the five counties in that particular award. Nothing in the announcement addresses what happens to someone before they ever reach a reentry program, in a cell, on a night the scanner that used to check for contraband simply wasn’t there.

It is also aimed entirely at the moment people leave custody — not the moment, five days into a sentence, when they’re still inside it.

There is still a door open here, and it matters that people know it: naloxone is now available over the counter in three FDA-approved forms, no prescription required, at pharmacies and even some convenience stores. That access exists on the outside regardless of what any sheriff’s office does inside a jail. It is not a fix for what happened to Anahi Rubio or Kiethsa Sasser. It is the thing that is still, tonight, in your hands.

Jessica Johnson still shows up outside Estrella Jail to release balloons for her sister. Carolina Lopez is still asking the same question a year later, because nobody with the authority to fix the gap has given her a real answer: how did her daughter get drugs in a building designed to prevent exactly that? The honest answer is that Maricopa County took out a checkpoint built to test its own staff’s integrity, kept it out through the worst year its jails have had in recent memory, and is now asking grieving families to accept, on faith, that the door it dismantled was never the one that mattered. Anahi Rubio doesn’t get to find out if that’s true. Her family does, every day, whether the county answers or not.