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Police in Wisconsin say the fentanyl-laced drugs that killed one person and caused three more to overdose in a village north of Milwaukee were bought at a state lawmaker’s tavern that has been the subject of multiple calls to police in recent years.
Republican Rep. Rob Brooks has owned the Railroad Station in Saukville since 2007 and said he was aware of issues with drugs at the bar shortly after purchasing it but thought they had been addressed.
A regular patron of Brooks’ bar sold cocaine laced with fentanyl to 28-year-old Nick Hamilton and three friends attending a birthday party there on May 5, Village of Grafton Police Chief Jeff Caponera said Monday. Hamilton overdosed that night and died in the hospital on May 8. Brooks said he was not at the bar that weekend.
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“It’s a tragedy what happened, no doubt, and we’ll do everything within our power to ensure nothing like this happens again,” Brooks said on Thursday. “We’re not running a bad establishment.”
But Joe Hamilton, Nick Hamilton’s father, questioned Brooks’ sincerity. Brooks has not reached out to the family or responded to their calls and did not publicly comment on the recent death or answer questions about the bar until Thursday.
“It ticks me off. It seems like he doesn’t care, like he doesn’t care about the community,” Joe Hamilton said on Wednesday.
While Brooks has sponsored measures to crack down on drug distribution as a member of the Assembly, police have been called for drug-related complaints at his bar.
In 2018, an undercover informant told Ozaukee County Sheriff’s deputies that a patron regularly dealt drugs at the Railroad Station on Thursday evenings, according to police reports obtained by The Associated Press. Officers searched for the man at the bar and other locations but did not find him.
Brooks said he was not aware of the 2018 police report and had no reason to suspect drugs were being used or…
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