Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of articles examining the fentanyl crisis that will appear in The Messenger this week.

It was nearing shift change on the evening of March 3, 2019, and Fort Dodge Police Officer Chris Weiland had just finished up with a call for service and was heading back to the Law Enforcement Center. He was headed toward downtown on the Kenyon Road Bridge when he saw a vehicle driving far too slow, so he turned on his lights and pulled it over.

What should have been a routine traffic stop turned into a brush with death.

“I remember the call beforehand. I had just been out to the ER, I was just taking a person out to the ER, that’s why I was out that way,” Weiland, who medically retired from law enforcement in 2021, said. “I actually watched him get administered Narcan for a Xanax overdose. I’m just sitting there watching and I’m like, it’s got to be horrible when you’re going through it.”

Weiland initiated the traffic stop on the vehicle. When Weiland went to get identification from the driver, he said, she was “just not acting right” and he could smell the odor of fresh marijuana in the vehicle.

The driver of the vehicle told the officer she didn’t have her driver’s license with her and was giving him a name and date of birth that didn’t return with anything from the state database. Sensing something was off, Weiland called for backup and a short while later, then-Lt. Dennis Quinn arrived.

Soon, the two officers were able to determine the driver’s identity — 28-year-old Kayla Potter, of Clare. They also learned that Potter had a suspended driver’s license.

Providing false identification information to a law enforcement officer is an arrestable offense in Iowa, so Potter was taken into custody, handcuffed and placed in the back of Weiland’s patrol vehicle.

Weiland could smell marijuana in the vehicle, which gave him probable cause to search it. Over his 20-year career in law enforcement, Weiland has likely pulled over thousands of drivers on the roads and conducted probable cause searches hundreds of times. But this one would be different.

Weiland found a small travel bag hidden under the front passenger seat.

“I went back to my car and started going through the bag because I wanted to get warm for a little while,” he said.

It was a cold late-winter evening and he wasn’t wearing a coat.

As Weiland searched the bag, he found a small box which contained a small plastic bag of white powder. He briefly opened the box to look inside and then shut it and put it back into the travel bag.

Because the cars were stopped in the middle of the Kenyon Road Bridge, Quinn stayed behind to wait for the tow truck for Potter’s vehicle while Weiland drove Potter to the Law Enforcement Center to be booked into jail.

“As soon as I got to South Eighth Street and turned off of Kenyon Road, I remember looking down the street and it’s like my eyes were kind of playing with me, like the road was growing a mile long,” Weiland said.

As he continued making his way toward downtown, he radioed dispatch.

“I remember I started coughing and I picked up the radio and I said, ‘Hey, something’s not right. I’m just not feeling right,'” Weiland said. “After that, I woke up in the ER. So apparently, according to the video, I drove for a block and a half to the LEC.”

Weiland has no memory of that final block and a half. Video footage from his body cam and the car’s camera show him pulling up to the sallyport on the west side of the building, where the vehicle stopped. The footage shows him struggling to put the vehicle in park as Officer Allie Thompson comes out of the LEC to find out what was wrong.

The incident was featured on an episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Body Cam” television series, which shows the footage from that day.

One thing the “Body Cam” TV show got wrong, Weiland said. Is that he did not “sniff” the substance he found in the bag.

“I’ve had two exposures to meth labs, pretty serious exposures that have caused me to go to the hospital,” he said. “One was in Swea City and one was in Dayton. I’m not putting anything up to my nose. I kind of just looked at it and then closed the box and put it back.”

According to the timestamps on the body camera footage shown in the TV show, less than five minutes had elapsed between Weiland opening the box with the white powder and Weiland’s vehicle pulling up to the LEC.

Thompson stayed with Weiland as medics with the Fort Dodge Fire Department were called. Then-Officer Matt Webb arrived a short time later. FDFD personnel had to pull Weiland out of the driver’s seat to put him on the ambulance gurney because the officer couldn’t stand on his own by that time.

Weiland was put in the ambulance and taken “10-33,” or emergent with lights and sirens, to UnityPoint Health – Trinity Regional Medical Center.

“It means this is a dire circumstance and we’ve got to get there fast,” Quinn, who is now the chief of police, said in the “Body Cam” episode.

When he regained consciousness in the ER, Weiland said, he initially started to put up a fight with the nurses because he didn’t know what was going on. He calmed once seeing his family and his fellow officers who had followed the ambulance to the ER.

A physician told Weiland later that he had depleted the entire supply of Narcan that was kept in the ER, and then he had to be hooked up to an IV drip of Narcan overnight while in the ICU. He also received two doses of Narcan in the ambulance while on the way to the hospital.

Narcan is a drug that is used to reverse the effects of opioids and is used in overdose situations.

Weiland remained in the hospital for about a day, where physicians could monitor his vitals. He was then discharged to recover at home, and was back on the road within a week.

Returning to work so soon after such a traumatic event was probably a mistake, Weiland said.

“The recovery, mentally, was hard — there’s still times today I still think back on it,” he said. “Going back to work after a week, and I got put back in the same car and got a call, and I just sat there. It’s like I know what I gotta do, but I can’t do it.

“It felt like when that happened to me, all the other officers just kind of disassociated themselves with me, so there was like nobody there to ever really help me along or anything like that.”

This was the first time in Fort Dodge, and possibly the first time in Iowa, a law enforcement officer was hospitalized for a substance suspected to be fentanyl, a synthetic opioid so powerful that even just two milligrams can be lethal. The aftermath and the efforts to return to “normal” were unchartered territory.

“Nobody knew what to do,” Weiland said.

Weiland said the incident “messed up” his head for a while and when he was having a hard time with it, he had people turn their backs on him when he asked for help.

“It’s the old adage that once the cop’s tainted, they’re not going to be good anymore,” he said. “Well, I honestly think if somebody would have listened, it could have been rectified.”

That ultimately led Weiland to decide to medically retire from law enforcement in August 2021.

Although testing was never able to definitively prove the unknown powdery substance was fentanyl, Weiland’s symptoms were consistent with those of fentanyl exposure. The Narcan is what helped revive him, indicating the substance was some type of opioid.

A question Weiland has gotten several times over the last four years, he said, is why didn’t the substance affect Potter, who was sitting in the back seat of the patrol vehicle when he opened the box with the powder.

“She’s built a tolerance to it,” he said.

With more than two decades of law enforcement experience, as well as 20 years of military service, Weiland has learned that there really is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop.

“Every traffic stop is different because it has its own dynamic,” he said. “There’s no set script about how it’s going to go — it’s determined by the encounter and how the person reacts.”

Still, nothing could have prepared Weiland for the harrowing experience of an opioid overdose.

“That actually scared me, because I’ve been in combat, I’ve been in Iraq and Afghanistan, for 20-some years, I’ve been deployed to multiple war zones. And I know what to do with something like that. I know what to do when some gunshots go off, but I literally had no clue what to do with that,” he said of the exposure to the unknown substance.

Though the substance could not be proven to be fentanyl, the experience opened Weiland’s eyes to just how dangerous a brief exposure can be. He noted that in the context of transporting fentanyl in a vehicle, anyone who has contact with that vehicle for any reason — traffic stop, medical emergency and even car maintenance — is at risk for being exposed.

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “Just don’t ever think that because it’s a small town that it’s not going to be there.”