FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

North Carolina Woman Sentenced to 10 Years for Fentanyl Pill Distribution

Ricketta Ann Twitty, 35, of Bostic, N.C., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl after being caught with nearly 600 counterfeit pills containing the drug.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 28, 2026, 11:40 a.m. ET
Developing · checked 2h ago

This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.

We last searched for new coverage of this at Aug 28, 2026, 11:08 a.m. ET — checked 2h ago.

ASHEVILLE, N.C. – Ricketta Ann Twitty, 35, of Bostic, N.C., was to 10 years in prison on August 28, 2026, for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, announced Russ Ferguson, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. Twitty was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release after completing her prison sentence. According to court documents and the sentencing hearing, officers with the Forest City Police Department responded to a call for service at a Walmart involving Twitty. Officers located Twitty near a vehicle where she was arrested. A search of her vehicle seized $7,297 in cash and more than 590 counterfeit pills in a prescription bottle. The pills were imprinted with “T/189,” a marker for the prescription drug Oxycodone Hydrochloride, and were determined to contain fentanyl. During the investigation, Twitty told investigators she received the counterfeit pills from suppliers based in Charlotte and that she distributed approximately 2,000 fentanyl pills a day during a two to three-week period. U.S. Attorney Ferguson said, “Ms. Twitty unnecessarily put a lot of lives at risk, at times distributing 2,000 pills per day.” Twitty is in federal custody and will be transferred to the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons upon designation to a federal facility. The case is part of Operation Take Back America, a nationwide initiative by the Department of Justice. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, and Forest City Police Department investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Hess prosecuted.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 128 Aug 2026, 15:40current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.