Early on in the murder trial of Emily Perkins this month, prosecutor Christopher Moll called witness after witness to the stand to testify about their struggles with addiction to prescription painkillers.
A preschool teacher who fit her drug purchases into her morning work breaks. A young woman who traded her body for pills. A young man who had his grandmother wait in the car while he slipped inside drug dealer Scott Hill’s trailer to make a buy.
“I wanted the jury to understand what was going on,” Moll said. “The addiction is so powerful. People were doing things they never imagined themselves doing.”
Including, Moll argued, pulling a trigger.
Last week, Moll convinced a Windsor Superior Court jury that Perkins’ addiction led her to fatally shoot Hill at his Bethel trailer in November 2011. The jury also concluded that in the drug deal gone awry, Perkins shot 19-year-old Emma Jozefiak, who was staying with Hill at the time, and left her for dead.
During her 11-day trial, Perkins testified that she lied to police about her involvement to protect her husband, Michael, who was battling terminal brain cancer.
But the jury didn’t buy it. After Thursday’s guilty verdict, Perkins, 29, now is looking at a potential life sentence.
On Monday, I called Moll at his office in Essex Junction, Vt. After 28 years as a prosecutor in Vermont, the 58-year-old Moll recently entered private practice. His first client was the Windsor County State’s Attorney’s Office, which hired him in January to take over the Perkins case. (Then-State’s Attorney Michael Kainen had departed to become a judge.)
When Moll started sifting through court documents, including depositions of potential witnesses, he could hardly believe what he was reading. Teenagers from all different socio-economic backgrounds were popping Percocets, a powerful prescription painkiller that sells for $40 a tablet on the street. Looking for a “quicker rush,” they snorted Percocets crushed with a spoon.
Then, in an act of desperation, they began grinding the pills into a powder that could be mixed with water and drawn into a syringe. “No one starts out thinking they’re going to eventually be sticking a needle in their arm,” Moll said.
One witness testified to taking up to 10 Percocets a day. If they couldn’t afford to keep up the habit, some became “pill sick.” They’d break into sweats, throw up, and hope to sleep away the pain. “You feel like you’re just going to die, if you don’t get more,” a young woman testified.
Moll came away from the case convinced that Gov. Peter Shumlin was spot-on in devoting his entire 2014 State of the State address to the state’s opiate and heroin addiction crisis.
“It’s hard to imagine a child in high school today not being exposed to it,” Moll said. “No one wants to believe it’s happening in their small town, but this is the nightmare in everyone’s backyard.”
Of course, not everyone who takes prescription painkillers ends up an addict. Some quit before getting hooked. Many kids resist the temptation to get caught up in the drug culture.
But, as Moll pointed out, “it’s everywhere,” and it’s not a problem “we can arrest our way out of.” More treatment and prevention programs are needed, he said.
The testimony heard in the Perkins case was an “education for everyone who sat in that courtroom,” Moll said. “It was a tragedy all around. There was a wave that left no one unscathed. If not for everyone being addicted to some degree, what do you think the odds of this ever happening?
“That’s not to say everyone would have been living happily ever after. They would have still been struggling.”
Jozefiak, now 23, is considered one of the lucky ones. She spent three days on the floor of Hill’s trailer with a .22-caliber bullet in her head before being found by a state trooper, who responded to pleas from family members worried about her whereabouts.
While recovering in the hospital, Jozefiak told me, she received a visit from South Royalton School Principal Shaun Pickett. He gave her The Art of Happiness, a 1998 book by the Dalai Lama. Jozefiak told me that she had yet to read it from cover to cover, but appreciated Pickett’s attempt to lift her spirits.
Pickett, who retired in 2012 after 26 years at the K-12 South Royalton School, is one of the most thoughtful and caring educators whom I’ve come across. He’s also the most candid.
I called him Monday to ask if he’d been following the trial. He had. “When all of this started unfolding, I wondered how could I have been so out of touch,” he said.
Pickett had known since elementary school some of the young people who took the witness stand. Emily Perkins was a decent student with caring parents. Emma Jozefiak was a standout athlete whose mother worked at the school.
Every school has substance abuse issues. Teens looking for drugs, particularly in the social media age, won’t have much of a problem finding them.
Still, Pickett finds himself playing Monday morning quarterback. He asks himself, “Where did we fail? What should we have done differently?
“You see the kids who go off and succeed, the ones who become doctors and teachers. You take pride in that you might have played a little part in it. But when it goes the other way, you need to take a little responsibility as well.”
I think Pickett is being a bit hard on himself. The tragedy that took place in Scott Hill’s trailer was difficult to predict.
But given what we learned over the last couple of weeks during the trial at the White River Junction courthouse, it now seems almost inevitable.
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Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.