Jennifer Shatzer found her 23-year-old son unconscious in a bedroom of their Lake Oswego home just days after Thanksgiving in 2022.
His half-eaten lunch from McDonald’s was nearby. Also …
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Jennifer Shatzer found her 23-year-old son unconscious in a bedroom of their Lake Oswego home just days after Thanksgiving in 2022.
His half-eaten lunch from McDonald’s was nearby. Also found beside him were eight counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl, tin foil and a straw, according to court records.
Lake Oswego police were called. Soon, the death investigation led to a federal inquiry and the arrest of the man who sold Rowan M. Shatzer the fentanyl that killed him.
But when Shatzer’s mother showed up for the sentencing of the convicted drug dealer this month, she opposed the prosecutor’s call for a prison term of nearly 8 years, as well as the defense lawyer’s request for a sentence of nearly four years.
The sentencing presented one of the rare occasions when the family of the deceased sought to set aside the prosecutor’s recommended sentence.
While she called her family’s loss unbearable, the mother told a judge she didn’t want 52-year-old Sean Keone Elsenbach to spend another day behind bars.
“We do not blame Sean for Rowan’s death,” she said. “Rowan’s disease claimed him, and that is the harsh reality we live with. Rowan would not want anyone to suffer for his choices.”
The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cassady Adams, said she valued the family’s views and recognized that Rowan Shatzer shared responsibility for his own death.
Yet, Adams added, “While we very much respect the Shatzers’ view, we disagree with it.”
The Shatzer family moved to Lake Oswego from Illinois when Rowan was young. Rowman attended what was then Lake Oswego’s Waluga Jr. High School and then Lakeridge High School.
He was Jennifer and John Shatzer’s first born, their only son. His sister is three years younger than him.
He died about a year before his paternal grandfather, who was 78.
“We are heartbroken as we stand here,” Rowan’s mother told U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson late last week in a 14th floor courtroom of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland. “The pain of losing him is indescribable, and it feels almost unbearable to speak of it in such a formal setting.”
Rowan played saxophone when he was younger but grew up loving all kinds of music. He liked art and enjoyed doing acrylic painting and thrived in the outdoors, whether it was hiking or climbing, his parents said. The family’s beloved German Shephard dog died the summer before he did, his parents said.
At some point while Rowan was in high school, an alcohol and drug addiction took hold. Close friends of his in junior high described him as shy and “wonderful,” but said he drifted to a different crowd once in high school.
He entered residential treatment while in high school. “We were just getting scared he was willing to try everything,” his mother said. He later earned a high school equivalency diploma.
“Rowan struggled with substance use disorder, a disease that brought immense personal pain and the stigma that too often surrounds addiction,” his mother said in court.
He tried to get help but the “powerful pull of the high” won out, she said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Cassady Adams said Elsenbach’s sale of fentanyl to the Lake Oswego man wasn’t an isolated one.
Elsenbach had been Rowan Shatzer’s source of supply for five months.
He sold him about 600 pills in 37 exchanges — approximately 60 grams of fentanyl — between June 24, 2022 and Nov. 28, 2022.
For a period, the sales were almost daily.
In 2022: June 25, 8 pills; June 27, 8 pills; June 29, 6 pills; June 30, 3; July 1, 12; July 2, an unknown number; July 4, 5 pills; July 5, 6 pills, July 6, 8 pills.
“It goes on and on and on,” Adams said.
Later, the quantity of pills sold increased.
July 27, 10 pills; July 30; 50; Aug. 2; 60 pills; Sept. 5, 10; Sept. 7, 15 pills; Sept. 9, 15; Sept. 9, 20 pills; Sept. 11, 15 pills.
Yet there was a gap in October and most of November 2022 — until that fateful day.
Rowan Shatzer’s mother said her son struggled to fight his addiction. Traditional detox treatments were painful and caused “unimaginable suffering” for their son, she said.
Fentanyl withdrawal can be marked by hot-cold flashes, twitchy legs, nausea and vomiting, restlessness, stomach cramps and body aches, rapid heart rate, insomnia and mental anguish.
Fentanyl is an extremely potent and habit-forming synthetic opioid. The drug is estimated to be between 50 and 100 times more powerful than morphine.
By September 2022, the family held out greater hope for Rowan.
He had transitioned from fentanyl to buprenorphine, or Suboxone, a detox drug that to some degree satisfies the brain’s craving for an opioid and reduces severe withdrawal symptoms yet does not produce a high.
“Rowan had been able to stay off fentanyl while on Suboxone,” Jennifer Shatzer told the court, “and we breathed the collective sigh of relief.”
Yet shortly after Thanksgiving of that year, he relapsed.
“He was torn between his desire to fight this illness, seeking treatment, therapy and support,” and the “powerful pull of the high,” his mother said.
“Every time he came off fentanyl, we hoped it would stick,” she said. “And every time, we feared it might not.”
On Nov. 28, 2022, Rowan Shatzer had asked to borrow his mother’s car to run some errands.
Jennifer Shatzer let him use her car during an exchange of text messages, according to investigators.
“I love you too,” was her final message sent to him at 1:49 p.m. that day.
About 30 minutes earlier, Rowan Shatzer had contacted Elsenbach by text message and agreed to buy about 10 fentanyl pills.
At 2:06 p.m., Rowan Shatzer messaged Elsenbach that he was on his way.
At 2:15 p.m., Rowan Shatzer called Elsenbach by phone, records showed.
At 2:38 p.m., Rowan Shatzer bought a hamburger, fries and a shake at a McDonald’s drive-through in Tigard.
Less than three hours later, Jennifer Shatzer, a nurse practitioner, came home and found her son unconscious. She called 911 at 5:14 p.m., administered the overdose reversal drug Narcan and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation under paramedics arrived.
The medical examiner ruled that Rowan Shatzer died of fentanyl toxicity.
Investigators reviewed the text messages on his cell phone, his phone’s GPS records and other surveillance footage and traced the sale of the fentanyl pills he smoked that day to Elsenbach.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations posed as Rowan Shatzer and set up another pill purchase from Elsenbach at the Washington Square Mall.
When Elsenbach arrived on Dec. 21, 2022, he was arrested. He had about 30 counterfeit pills containing fentanyl on him, according to court records.
At Elsenbach’s sentencing, Adams, the prosecutor argued that Elsenbach’s Nov. 28, 2022 fentanyl sale to Shatzer wasn’t isolated. She urged a sentence of seven years and eight months.
She pointed to his criminal history: Convictions for felony theft in 2013, eluding a police officer in 2018, identity theft in 2018, and the manufacture and delivery of controlled substances, Adderall, in 2018.
“We have a defendant who’s been convicted and sentenced to prison for a year for selling drugs to somebody, and now he’s graduated to selling fentanyl, which is much more lethal and addictive than Adderall,” she said.
While Eldenbach got the drugs from a larger drug trafficking organization, he was not a drug courier or mule for that group but sold to others on his own.
He was a street-level dealer who made money off of Shatzer for five months, Adams said.
“He was running his own business. …He himself arranged every single deal. He sold those pills. He made the decision to go and do it over and over and over again, and he financially benefited over and over and over again.’’
Adams told the judge: “This drug was a poison, and Mr. Elsenbach was selling this poison day after day after day after day for months, and then finally it killed somebody.”
Peyton Lee, Elsenbach’s assistant federal public defender, argued for a lesser prison term of three years and 10 months.
Elsenbach, she said, suffered from his own drug addiction and sold to support his habit. He had been in a car accident and later had surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. When his pain medication ran out, he got addicted to fentanyl, she said.
“He wonders often why it wasn’t him” who died of an overdose, Lee said.
Elsenbach expressed a desire to turn his life around and put drug addiction behind him for good.
Even though their text messages were solely about the sale of pills, Elsenbach told the judge Rowan Shatzer was his friend.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it,” he said. “And I am sorry for that.”
Rowan Shatzer’s mother and father, younger sister and aunt were among those who attended the sentencing.
Jennifer Shatzer read a prepared statement on behalf of the family, who said they didn’t support sending Elsenbach to prison for Rowan’s death.
“When Rowan reached out to Sean for fentanyl that fateful day, he wasn’t poisoned, as some might say, he overdosed,” she said. “Sean just happened to be the person Rowan called that day. We understand that it could have been anyone … Had it not been Sean, it would have been someone else.”
“We do not seek revenge, and we do not support sending Sean to prison for Rowan’s death,” Jennifer Shatzer said.
The family believes it would be far more productive to reduce the demand for drugs by providing “meaningful support for those struggling with addiction,” and addressing the root cause of the crisis, rather than simply punishing people “caught up in it,” Rowan’s mother said. She pointed out a “critical” shortage of prevention and treatment resources.
Instead, she asked that Elsenbach be given the chance to make amends for Rowan’s death by dedicating his life to treatment and service to others grappling with addiction.
“Sean, you have expressed a desire to live your life in honor of Rowan. We ask that you stay true to those words, and we believe you can do more good by becoming an active, positive member of our community.”
That’s what Rowan would have wanted, his mother said.
“This is how Rowan’s love lives on, and how Rowan’s death can have meaning,” she said. “We loved Rowan deeply, and he loved us. We miss him more than words can express.”
The judge said she considered the nature of the crime, as well as Elsenbach’s positive performance while out of custody on pretrial release pending sentencing, noting he’s stayed sober and maintained steady employment.
She said she selected a sentence that was sufficient but not greater than necessary and chose a prison term in between those sought by the prosecutor and defense lawyer: 6 years and eight months.
Elsenbach is allowed to remain out of custody and surrender to the U.S. Marshals Service to begin his prison term on Feb. 13.
As Elsenbach stood up, Jennifer Shatzer waited in the public gallery’s front row. As he walked toward the gallery, she reached out and hugged him.
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