This week, officials confirmed that swimmer Jamie Cail, who was found dead in the U.S. Virgin Islands in February, died of an accidental fentanyl poisoning.
Cail, a 42-year-old swimming champion, was initially believed to have died from a cardiac arrest, after she was found unresponsive on February 21 by her boyfriend on the floor of his home. Cail lived and worked at a bookshop on the island of St. John.
Hospital staff on the island performed CPR when she arrived with her partner and a friend and “indicated that she was in cardiac arrest,” but Cail “succumbed” and passed away.
Detectives were informed of the dead-on-arrival case, and an autopsy was performed to determine her cause of death. On August 22, a coroner on the U.S. Virgin Islands announced that she had died of a “fentanyl intoxication with aspiration of gastric content.”
Fentanyl, a powerful opioid used to treat pain, has been the cause behind an increasing number of deaths in the U.S. in recent years. Over 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses took place in the U.S. in 2021, and most of those deaths were caused by fentanyl.
The U.S. Virgin Islands has had a significant drug trafficking problem for years, but that trade has primarily been in cocaine and marijuana. Fentanyl has not been a problem in the territory until recently.
Cail marks the second in the islands related to the drug, while the first occurred on April 28, 2021, when 30-year-old Rachel ‘Starchild’ Atnip was found dead at her home on St. Thomas.
As a teenager, Cail was a member of the US team at the 1997 Pan Pacific Championships, winning the gold medal on the team’s 800 free relay. She also won a silver medal at the 1998–1999 World Aquatics Swimming World Cup in Brazil.
Her family said they have been left “devastated” and “shook to the core” by her death. Some of her friends, however, have posted cryptic messages, with one claiming she had been “trying to escape,” and saying she “deserves justice,” despite no arrests being made in connection with her death.
They described her as an “amazing human and friend” while writing that they were going to “find out the truth.”
“She tried to escape to start healing. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it in time. You were so close honey,” they wrote in another post.
The island of St. John also made news recently after 22-year-old Lily Ledbetter passed away from an unknown cause, in a death shrouded in mystery.
Dr. Francisco Landron, the medical examiner in the case, told Fox News, “It was basically a negative autopsy. There is no injury, nothing to explain the cause of the death.”
Scroll down to leave a comment and share your thoughts.
