A Jacksonville man caught handling the final mile of a cross-country delivery of thousands of doses of fentanyl and methamphetamine will serve about 17 years in prison, a federal judge has decided.
Owens Coleman Parker Jr., 51, had been promised $1,000 to drive an SUV from an Edgewood Avenue shopping center to a nearby home on Woodstock Avenue, according to court records.
Arrested after a car chase but released from jail on bond, Parker fled to Mexico in 2023 and hid for a year and a half before surrendering himself at the Arizona border in April 2025.
He pleaded guilty in February to conspiring to possess meth and fentanyl with intent to distribute, telling U.S. District Judge Jordan E. Pratt on June 24 he had been “humbled” by his experience.
“I’m here to accept accountability. … I made a terrible choice, just trying to make a little extra money,” said Parker, a father of seven who had held jobs from janitorial work to lawn care and home repair and had become a tiny figure in a far-flung drug trafficking organization.
That trafficking group had hidden 26 vacuum-sealed bundles of drugs in a compartment inside a Honda Pilot and paid a commercial trucker to haul it from Arizona to Jacksonville ― more than 1,800 miles ― on a car-carrying truck.
But the truck had been stopped by authorities and searched along the way, so agents were covertly watching when Parker took possession of the SUV, intending to drive the remaining 0.8 miles to a trafficking contact if he hadn’t been arrested.
Questioned in 2023, Parker admitted having delivered a car holding drugs for $1,000 once before and having transferred money to Mexico through Western Union for a Hispanic man he knew only as “Reaper,” according to a document completed when he pleaded guilty.
He also admitted some small, street-level drug dealing and let agents look through five cell phones he was carrying, some with drug photos on them, but those paled in comparison to the shipment Parker went to jail for.
In the sealed bundles in the SUV Parker drove, agents recovered 6,046 grams (13 pounds, five ounces) of fentanyl and 7,375 grams (16 pounds, four ounces) of pure meth.
Translating shipment sizes to individual doses is complicated but the packages certainly held enough to supply thousands of drug users.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration describes 1,000 grams (one kilogram) of fentanyl as having the potential to kill 500,000 people, while a 2025 study of meth users reported average meth use of less than one gram per day.
Because of the weight of his shipment, federal law said Parker had to serve at least 10 years in prison and had the potential of serving life.
Sentencing guidelines recommended a term roughly between 21 years and 27 years, but Pratt accepted a prosecutor’s recommendation that a lower sentence could suffice.
“This was a somewhat more sophisticated scheme,” the judge said, but added that Parker “is not the one profiting in any significant way.”
The judge set the sentence at 210 months (17 years, six months), meaning Parker, who has been in jail before but never in prison, should be released before he reaches age 70.
“It is not the end of your story,” the judge told Parker. “You have choices you have to make going forward.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida man gets prison for hauling thousands of doses of fentanyl, meth
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union | USA TODAY Network
