Sioux Falls Woman Sentenced to 20 Years in Federal Prison for Distribution of a Controlled Substance Resulting in Death

SIOUX FALLS - United States Attorney Ron Parsons announced today that U.S. District Judge Karen E. Schreier has sentenced a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, woman convicted of Distribution of a Controlled Substance Resulting in Death. The sentencing took place on October 5, 2026.

Jessi Whaley, 27, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay a $100 special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund.

Whaley was indicted for Distribution of a Controlled Substance Resulting in Death by a federal grand jury in June 2025. She pleaded guilty on July 23, 2026.

On November 9, 2024, Sioux Falls police officers responded to a report of people passed out in a vehicle at a business in south Sioux Falls. They found Shannon Groeneweg unresponsive in the vehicle and determined that she had likely used fentanyl. The officers were unable to revive Groeneweg and she passed away. The coroner determined Groeneweg died from fentanyl and carfentanil toxicity. Investigators reviewed surveillance video and Groeneweg's phone to determine that Jessi Whaley had provided Groeneweg powder fentanyl on the day of her death shortly before she was found unconscious. Groeneweg ingested the fentanyl she obtained from Whaley and died as a result.

"I am heartbroken that we continue to lose lives to fentanyl and its illegal analogs," said U.S. Attorney Parsons. "Powdered fentanyl is synthesized by Mexican drug cartels, using precursor chemicals acquired from China, and then smuggled across our border and distributed to every part of South Dakota by drug trafficking organizations that have their hooks into people in almost every community."

"Fentanyl is sold in amounts small enough to disappear into a pocket, and lethal enough to erase a life in minutes," U.S. Attorney Parsons continued. "It is a substance that does not negotiate. It does not distinguish between a first-time user and an addict in a longtime struggle. It simply stops your breathing and stops your heart, and then the people who loved you spend years trying to learn how to live around that silence. Today's federal prison sentence cannot restore what was taken. It can, and does, hold the person who sold and profited from that poison accountable for the death and misery that followed, and it tells every dealer in the drug distribution chain who treats a fatal dose as inventory and victims as disposable customers, that this office will not."

This case was investigated by the Sioux Falls Area Drug Task Force and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Hodges prosecuted the case.

Whaley was immediately remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.