MUKILTEO — It was the sixth time a woman had tried to leave her abusive boyfriend, when he pinned her down in a Mukilteo hotel room, forced drugs into her mouth and nose, and chased her to the parking lot where she overdosed, according to new charges.
Police revived her with naloxone, an antidote for opioids.
The ex-boyfriend, Zachary Lowell Madding, 29, has been charged with first-degree assault and first-degree robbery for the May 19 attack at a hotel on Harbour Place. Earlier, he had been arrested for investigation of attempted murder.
Madding was on probation with the Department of Corrections last month when he invited the woman to his room, with an offer to give her drugs that could help to wean her off an addiction, according to court papers. She had been using opiates for about four years. She accepted the offer, but texted a new boyfriend around 6:30 a.m. asking him to pick her up from the hotel. He showed up, but couldn’t find her. She texted him again around 9 a.m.
“Please come get me.”
Once the new boyfriend walked into the lobby to ask for the room number, he saw his girlfriend running outside — “red-faced, crying, flushed, barely dressed, no shoes on, a ripped bag,” the charges say. She told him Madding shoved Xanax down her throat until she threw up, then forced a fentanyl spray up her nose.
Just then, Madding ran up saying the woman couldn’t leave. The new boyfriend described the scene to police: “In just a matter of seconds he had shoved me, I turned around, I threw him on the bench and choked him out, and by the time I got done doing that I looked over and she was dead.”
The woman had passed out. Her breathing was shallow and she had almost no pulse. A police sergeant arrived within a minute and gave her the opioid antidote. Seconds later she sat up and started to talk. An ambulance rushed her to a hospital. As she recovered, she told police the man got angry when she tried to walk out the door. He told her he would do anything to make her stay, she reported.
Mukilteo police arrested the man, who gave officers a fake name at first, according to the charges. He’d been using forged IDs to get hotel rooms. In the room police found signs of a struggle and drug abuse: a broken Xanax bar on a pillow, crushed Xanax on a sheet, Suboxone strips, three bottles of fentanyl and dozens of Xanax bars.
Xanax, a trade name for alprazolam, is an addictive drug used to treat anxiety and panic disorders. Fentanyl is a highly potent opioid, about 30 to 50 times as strong as heroin, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. It has been linked to a sudden rise in drug overdoses.
Charging papers reveal the woman reported Madding for domestic violence in Seattle in January.
At the scene, police found 2 kilograms of heroin packed and ready to be shipped by the U.S. Postal Service. Madding told police he’d been selling drugs on the dark web, court papers say. Seattle police seized carfentanil powder, a synthetic version of fentanyl, when they served a search warrant.
The woman told police she went back to the man in May because he’d offered to help her get clean. She had been off hard drugs for five days, she told officers.
“But then he had to use the fentanyl spray and ruin it all.”
Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.
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If you or someone you know needs help with a domestic violence situation, contact Domestic Violence Services of Snohomish County’s 24-hour confidential hotline at 425-252-2873.
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