ARLINGTON -- Christian Taylor was shot to death after he busted into an Arlington car dealership and vandalized cars.
Outrage erupted among some when a Tarrant County grand jury did not indict the now-fired police officer who pulled the trigger that killed the unarmed 19-year-old. However, in a letter to the Taylor family’s attorney, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson said the focus should be on the dangerous drugs Taylor took before he was seen on surveillance video acting erratically and jumping on cars.
The mystery of Christian Taylor’s bizarre behavior was solved in the toxicology lab at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
"We have liquid chromatography, and then mass spectrometry,” said chief toxicologist Robert Johnson.
Johnson helped develop a test to detect a form of synthetic LSD like Taylor took. It’s called "N-bomb."
"These new things that hit the market, we don't have a way to find them,” Johnson said.
But he has linked synthetic LSD to four recent deaths of young people, and he's all but certain of a fifth.
One of them was 22-year-old Aaron Preston of Keene.
"He was all alone in his house. Used an N-bomb drug," Johnson said. "Self-mutilation and bleeding to death was the cause of death.”
Strange, violent, self-destructive acts are hallmarks of synthetic LSD.
Robert Johnson says deaths and injuries are rising more than we know, because scientists don't know what to test for.
Manufacturers keep changing formulas. The needle in the haystack keeps moving.
“We can’t stop things being shipped to us from China," Johnson said. "There are thousands of websites that will sell these synthetic drugs, [for] three clicks and a credit card number.”
And now Johnson has another potentially-deadly mystery to solve: He's starting to see blood tests on DWI's come back clean -- no alcohol or drugs.
It’s happened several times since April. Johnson suspects a new synthetic has hit the streets that cannot yet be detected.