WARSAW — The first instinct of The 35-year-old woman arrested last week and caught in possession of large amounts of meth, fentanyl and cocaine was to flee.

But soon after her arrest, Erika Bruner began talking with investigators about her business practices.

Bruner fled police after an attempted traffic stop on Jan. 17 for disregarding a stop sign. As she drove away, Bruner threw two black bags and a drink from her SUV. After a short chase, she eventually pulled over on Backwater Road south of North Webster and was apprehended.

Soon after, though, her outlook changed and she made some eye-popping admissions to police, according to court documents.

She told investigators that she would acquire a pound of methamphetamine and sell it in Kosciusko County in one day.

The Warsaw woman admitted she sold large quantities of methamphetamine fentanyl, cocaine and marijuana. She said the last time she obtained meth on Jan. 5 she sold it to six people.

The bust involved the seizure of 2.9 pounds of meth, 20 grams of fentanyl, 27 grams of cocaine, as well as LSD, Xanax, five firearms and a drone used to deliver drugs.

Court paperwork did not refer to the use of the drone.

Contents of the two black bags included drugs and an unloaded handgun, court records said.

Bruner said she decided to end the police chase after talking with her boyfriend on a cell phone while driving.

The investigation began as a result of tips from concerned residents.

Bruner, who has a criminal record involving drugs and at least one gun conviction, is facing a large number of charges in both Kosciusko and Elkhart counties.

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WARSAW -- Officials are seeing a slow rise in the presence of xylazine – a horse sedative known on the street as "tranq."

The drug, which leaves users in a heavy haze and can be lethal, first began to appear on the East Coast.

Drug Enforcement officials are seeing it more often in the Midwest and is often being mixed with illegal drugs like fentanyl, cocaine and heroin.

It was detected in about 800 drug deaths in the U.S. in 2020, most of them in the Northeast. By 2021, it was present in more than 3,000 fatalities — with the most in the South — according to a report last year from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Associated Press reported in April.

This year, Indiana lawmakers passed legislation requiring coroners to test for xylazine in all suspected overdose deaths.

The presence of xylazine was confirmed in an overdose death earlier this year in Kosciusko County, according to County Coroner Tyler Huffer.

As of last week, the county had recorded eight overdose deaths with xylazine found in one case. Fentanyl was found in five of the fatal cases, Huffer said.

When combined with fentanyl or other synthetic opioids, xylazine can increase the potential for fatal overdoses, according to the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Carolyn Warner-Greer, medical director for the Bowen Recovery Center, said she’s seeing signs of it locally.

“I’ve probably seen it ten times in the past year so it’s not a gigantic number at all, but that’s how everything starts --  small,” Warner-Greer said.

She said the illegal drug culture has changed in recent years when overdose deaths often involved just one main drug. Fentynal was unheard of five years ago and the opioid epidemic has moved away from pain pills due to new market restrictions.

Warner-Greer said much of the problem in this era of meth, fentanyl and heroin is that users don’t know what they’re buying and using.

Essentially, nobody knows precisely what they are purchasing and consuming because various other drugs are being added, she said.

"If you’re buying a pain pill and its actually pressed fentanyl, or you’re buying Xanax and it’s actually fentanyl – this contaminated drug supply is one of many things that make it very unsafe,” she said.

Xylazine is also characterized by ulcerations on the skin at the injection site that can require amputation of a limb.

Because the drug is not an opioid, its effects cannot be reversed with Naloxone.

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