The death of beloved actor Michael K. Williams was another chapter in the alarming rise of fentanyl-related overdoses. Now, after a brief trial, one of the four drug dealers responsible for the lethal narcotics purchased by the actor has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.
According to The Root, Carlos Macci will serve out his sentence and then spend a year in an inpatient drug treatment
facility due to his own lifelong battle with addiction. The 72-year-old addressed the court before his sentencing with deep remorse for his actions. “I would like to say, Your Honor, I’m sorry for what has happened,” he said.Williams never shied away from talking about his experiences with drugs, and admitted to using during the height of his fame as Omar Little on the HBO series The Wire.
The show’s creator, David Simon
, wrote a letter to the judge on behalf of Macci, asking for leniency due to Williams’ commitment to decriminalizing drug addiction. “No possible good can come from incarcerating a (72-year-old) soul, largely illiterate, who has himself struggled with a lifetime of addiction and who has not engaged in street-level sales of narcotics with ambitions of success and profit but rather as someone caught up in the diaspora of addiction himself,” Simon wrote. “Michael would look at Mr. Macci and hope against hope that this moment in which he finds himself might prove redemptive, that his remaining years might amount to something more, and that by the grace of love and leniency, something humane and worthy might be rescued from the tragedy.”Before his death, Williams spoke candidly about how playing Montrose Freeman on the HBO series Lovecraft Country led him to enter therapy to further heal the parts of him that sought drugs as a refuge. “I just started therapy, you know, and really taking that seriously and starting to unpack, like you said, the critic in my head and what and how that has affected my actions, my responses to certain situations, my relationships,” he said. “It was a very new process for me.”