Two University of Mississippi students who died the same day in Oxford had the same three substances in their bloodstreams, federal court documents show, tying the fatalities to pills recovered from a local tobacco shop now at the center of federal drug charges.
Fox News reported that toxicology findings for Aidan Hamilton, 18, and Robert Strang, 20, listed mitragynine along with the Schedule I controlled substances MGM-15 and MGPI. Investigators determined both students had Smax-Mango Breeze pills in their possession when they died on Sept. 21.
Those court records place the deaths inside a narcotics case aimed at Puffs Vape, Tobacco and Beer Store in Oxford. Law enforcement arrested Yahya Mohamed Mosleh, 51, and Islam Mohamed Mosleh, 18, on federal drug charges after tracing the students’ purchases to the shop. The legal stakes are plain: prosecutors are building a probable-cause bridge from the pills on the shelves to the substances in the students’ blood.
Court filings state the three substances appear together in Smax-Mango Breeze pills. Officers also found packages of Smax Mango Breeze MGM-15 at both death locations. The packages carried price tags reading $39.99, each marked with a black smudge on the first 9.
Lafayette County Metro Narcotics said in a September statement that packaging tied to kratom-related products turned up at both scenes. A package of Smax Pseudo-DHM tablets, described as a synthetic kratom-derived product, was found near Hamilton when paramedics arrived.
Bank records showed Hamilton and Strang both made purchases at Puffs on the same date before their deaths. The full public toxicology report had not yet been released when the court filings surfaced, but the documents already named the shared substances and linked them to the product line seized in the probe.
Separate court reporting added cause-of-death detail. The New York Post reported one student died from combined use of various substances including cough syrup, while the other died from inhalation asphyxiation, with synthetic kratom compounds connected to SMAX pills sold at local smoke shops.
Documents from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi frame the government’s theory in direct terms. Prosecutors cast the lab-matched drugs as the same type seized from the Moslehs under a search warrant.
"There is also probable cause to believe these drugs caused two overdose deaths in Oxford, Mississippi. The Government proved that there was probable cause that the laboratory-tested drugs taken by the two overdose victims were the same type of drugs that were seized from the Moslehs during a court-authorized search warrant."
That language does not amount to a final adjudication of guilt. It does show how the government is asking the court to treat the toxicology results, the matching packaging, and the store seizures as one continuous chain.
After lab testing, agents concluded the products contained the Schedule I controlled substances MGM-15 and MGPI. Schedule I status means federal law treats the substances as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. That classification sits at the core of the charging theory now moving through federal court.
Agents arranged a controlled purchase from Yahya Mosleh after the students died. Court documents say he sold a product hidden in a locked container. The product had been banned by local ordinance for more than four years.
The filings describe the sale in striking detail. Yahya Mosleh warned the informant while completing the transaction, then tried to hide what he was doing when other people walked in.
"As the purchase was being made, Yahya Mosleh even told the informant that people were dying from similar products and to be careful. He additionally attempted to conceal his sale when other third parties entered the store, only completing it to the informant when those parties had exited."
Shortly after that buy, agents secured a search warrant and searched the store. They recovered the same Smax Mango Breeze MGM-15 product with the exact same packaging, the exact same ingredients, and the exact same $39.99 price tag with the smudge on the 9. That match gave investigators a clean line from the death scenes back to inventory still on hand at Puffs.
Yahya Mohamed Mosleh and Islam Mohamed Mosleh were arrested on charges tied to the narcotics investigation at the Oxford shop. Both face federal drug charges. Islam Mosleh is identified in the records as Yahya’s 18-year-old son.
A federal judge ordered Yahya Mosleh held pending trial after finding him a flight risk with ties to another country. Islam Mosleh was set for release on a $20,000 unsecured bond. His conditions include a curfew and location monitoring.
Those custody decisions matter for more than case management. They signal how the court weighed community safety and appearance risk after the government put overdose deaths and Schedule I lab results into the probable-cause record.
Court documents also reach back years before the Sept. 21 deaths. A state grand jury in Lafayette County, Mississippi, previously indicted the owner of Puffs for distribution of a controlled substance. That owner absconded. Investigators believe he has been running the store remotely from Egypt.
Authorities have not publicly released the owner’s name in the materials described, and the filings summarized here do not list a docket number or the precise federal statutes charged against the Moslehs. What the record does show is continuity: an earlier controlled-substance indictment, an owner who fled, and a shop still moving product that local ordinance had banned for years.
The deaths hit the Ole Miss campus hard. Hamilton and Strang were students in a college town where a tobacco and vape shop sat within reach of campus life. Bank records, matching packaging, and toxicology overlap are now the spine of a federal case that treats those deaths as more than isolated tragedy.
Investigators will need to establish the full chemical profile beyond the three substances already named, including how mitragynine relates to the Schedule I designations assigned to MGM-15 and MGPI in the lab work. They will also need to lock down the exact purchase dates reflected in the bank records and the calendar date of the controlled buy.
No public results have been released that detail the precise local ordinance text used to ban the product, or the specific street addresses where the students died. Fox News Digital contacted the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi for additional information as the filings emerged ahead of the full toxicology report’s public release.
Procedurally, the next public markers are familiar in federal drug cases: further detention or bond litigation, discovery over the lab reports, and any superseding papers that spell out counts and penalties with more precision than the probable-cause narrative already on file. Each step will test whether the packaging match, the controlled purchase, and the shared toxicology hold up under adversarial scrutiny.
For Oxford and for parents sending students into college towns, the case lands on a basic enforcement question. When a shop keeps selling banned synthetic products, and when those products later show up in the blood of dead students, the system either draws a straight line of accountability or it leaves the next warning unheeded.
