By Stan Fisher
Register Correspondent

CLINTON — In what authorities believe is a rare achievement for criminal justice, a notorious West Haven drug dealer was sentenced to 10 years in prison Tuesday for selling a young Clinton mother a fatal dose of heroin.

Blas Tony Zayas, 40, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in Middletown Superior Court. He was also to be sentenced later in the day in New Haven Superior Court for narcotics sales, but those cases were continued to September, court officials said.

“This sort of crime, where someone sells a bag of heroin to a person who dies from it, are rarely solved because of the difficulty of connecting the killer to the victim,” police Chief Todd Lawrie said. “I’m extremely proud of the work Sgt. Joe Flynn and our detectives have done on this case, to bring this guy to justice. That’s good work.”

In April, 2009, police found the body of the woman, identified only as 29 years old and the mother of two or three young children, dead of a heroin overdose in a room at the Lamplighter Motel in Clinton.

Through telephone records and interviews with informants and residents, police quickly were able to connect her to Zayas, although they said at the time they did not know how the relationship originated.

Through the months that followed, Clinton detectives and officers from the Statewide Narcotics Task Force said they were able to make numerous purchases of heroin from Zayas, and that during those encounters, he made self-incriminating statements about his role in the young woman’s death.

Police arrested Zayas in December 2009 on numerous counts of narcotics sales and seized more than 700 bags of heroin from him.

Flynn said at the time of the arrest that they were able to tie Zayas to the overdose because “we had so many buys from him, and so many statements from him. He implicated himself.”

Formerly of First Avenue, West Haven, Zayas had been incarcerated since his arrest in lieu of $100,000 bail on the manslaughter charge and $150,000 bail on the six cases of narcotics sales pending in New Haven.

Zayas is also awaiting the outcome of pending federal charges for narcotics sales. He has a history of previous drug convictions.

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