A callous Bloods gang member will spend 40 years in federal prison for selling a killer dose of fentanyl to a Staten Island man.
Keith Wyche, 38, was sentenced Tuesday, after a Brooklyn Federal Court jury found him and an accomplice guilty in 2023 of running a door-to-door drug-dealing ring, and of peddling the drugs that caused the fatal 2017 overdose and another near-fatal OD.
Every day from February 2017 to September 2018, Wyche and his accomplice, Oniel Allen, sent out mass texts under the names “Marco” and James” to their customers, letting them know they were open for business.
“Good Morning” or “Rise and Shine,” the duo regularly texted.
One of those customers, a 43-year-old Staten Island dad named Vincent Price, bought fentanyl from Wythe on April 18, 2017 — “the date that he would buy drugs for the last time,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gilbert Rein said at trial.
“It was all about money. That’s what it came down to. No matter the cost, no matter the danger, no matter the risk of death,” Rein said.
Price, who had a young daughter, was staying with his father, also Vincent. It was Price’s dad who found his lifeless body in the bathroom, a belt tight around his arm, with a needle nearby.
The elder Price described the day in gut-wrenching trial testimony, and told the jury about how he made his final farewell to his son.
“They finally came to take him out and they had him in the body bag, and outside, I touched the bag…. I’m sorry. I touched the body bag and told him goodbye,” the father testified.
On Oct. 27, 2018, tragedy almost struck a second time, when Sarah Wieboldt, 28, nearly died of a drug OD in her car. First responders saved her life with the anti-OD drug Narcan, and her phone had text messages similar to Price’s, prosecutors said. She started helping authorities, and ultimately testified against Wyche and Allen.
In a bid for leniency, Wyche’s lawyer, Gary Schoer, wrote on June 4 that he thought he was buying “pure heroin of good quality” from his supplier, and only learned it contained fentanyl after the fact.
Wyche also wrote a letter to Judge Dora Irizarry, who handed down his sentence, apologizing and stating, “Addiction is not something that should be taken advantage of, and as a product of addiction myself at one point, I should’ve known that and have done better.
Rein, who asked Irizarry to hand down a heavy sentence, wrote that the damage the two men did “may never be fully known.”
‘The defendants’ operation was brazen and sophisticated,” he wrote on May 15. “They took protective measures to safeguard their operation. This included requiring all new customers to use narcotics in front of them to prove that they were not members of law enforcement.”
Allen, 31, was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on June 5.
“Both defendants have been punished with very long jail sentences for pushing drugs, including heroin and fentanyl, which tragically claimed the life of one victim and nearly killed another member of our Staten Island community,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Tuesday.
