Tomball man gets six years in first fentanyl murder case

Eric Sembera was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to delivery of a controlled substance causing death in the fentanyl death of his coworker, 24-year-old Erica Russell. The case started after a Tomball restaurant shift and ended with Russell dead in her apartment on Tomball Parkway, a sequence that has made the sentence one of the clearest local tests yet of how Harris County treats workplace-linked fentanyl deaths.

Investigators said Sembera gave Russell a fatal bump of fentanyl in August 2024. FOX 26 Houston reported that the two were out together on Aug. 2, 2024, and stopped at Little Woodrow’s, where Sembera offered Russell fentanyl while they were celebrating her birthday. Court records said he later took her to the emergency room after she became unresponsive. Russell left against medical advice, then was found dead the next day at 29807 Tomball Parkway.

Tomball police described the case as the department’s first fentanyl murder investigation, a label that reflected how seriously investigators viewed the death. Sembera, 26, was charged under Texas’s fentanyl-murder framework, created by House Bill 6 and taking effect in 2023. Legal summaries say a conviction can carry a first-degree felony range of five to 99 years in prison and a possible $10,000 fine, placing the six-year sentence on the low end of the punishment scale even as it marks a felony prison term.

FOX 26 Houston also reported that Sembera admitted he had a fentanyl addiction and said he regularly smoked fentanyl, telling investigators they would find paraphernalia in his home and vehicle. The detail underscores how the case moved beyond a simple overdose narrative and into a criminal inquiry about who supplied the drug and where the chain of events began.

Russell’s family has been left to absorb the loss of a young woman her mother, Denise Russell, described as “a ray of sunshine.” Her stepmother said the family did not believe Erica knowingly took fentanyl. The case now lands in a county where Harris County Public Health says it is still running overdose-prevention efforts through the CDC-funded Overdose Data to Action program, after local reporting showed substance-involved deaths rising from 673 in 2018 to 1,177 in 2022.