A Weathersfield, Vt., man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to being a felon in possession of firearms in Vermont and possessing fentanyl and cocaine with intent to distribute them in New Hampshire.
In May 2025, Claremont police used a crowbar to pry open the door of a hotel room where Marshall Gagne, 35, and six other people were flushing fentanyl down the toilet and bathtub drain, according to court records.
Once inside, police arrested Gagne and found more than $11,000 in cash in Gagne’s backpack, with fentanyl residue on a shoulder strap. The hotel room also contained a Glock 19, a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, with Gagne’s DNA on it.
A day after his arrest by Claremont police, Vermont State Police executed a search warrant at Gagne’s mother’s house in Weathersfield, about 10 minutes west of the Claremont hotel.
According to court records, law enforcement found roughly $5,000 and 13 guns in a camping trailer on the property, including AR-style rifles and ghost guns, which are homemade firearms with no serial numbers. They also found a silencer with its serial number scratched off, gun parts, ammunition and the box for the pistol found in the Claremont hotel room.
As a previously convicted felon, Gagne was prohibited from possessing any firearms or ammunition.
Gagne has a lengthy criminal history, according to court records, including Vermont convictions from 2012 through 2019 for cocaine, heroin and reckless endangerment; convictions in Massachusetts in 2021 for heroin possession and selling crack cocaine in Vermont; and other drug-related arrests that did not result in prosecution.
Gagne later coached his mother to lie to federal investigators, instructing her to tell them that he sold the camping trailer to a drug dealer who had been fatally shot in an August 2025 encounter with law enforcement, according to court records.
“You can say whatever you want to say as long as it doesn’t incriminate me,” Gagne told his mother, according to court records. “That trailer did not belong to either you or I.”
Investigators later found only Gagne’s DNA on the guns recovered from the trailer, not the dead man’s.
Four months after his arrest in Claremont, Gagne pleaded guilty in Claremont Circuit Court to misdemeanor criminal trespass and was sentenced to 90 days in Sullivan County Jail.
In January, Gagne was indicted in U.S. District Court in Burlington on one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm, one count of possession of fentanyl and cocaine with intent to distribute, and one count of possessing the pistol found in the Claremont hotel room in furtherance of drug trafficking.
Gagne entered a plea agreement in May, pleading guilty to the gun possession and drug charges. The agreement set a sentencing range of between seven years and 11 years, eight months.
“In two days in May last year, law enforcement from two states stopped Marshall Gagne’s drug business in its tracks,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Dana Hill wrote in the government’s sentencing memorandum earlier this month, arguing for 140 months, the top of the range.
Gagne’s defense attorney, Federal Public Defender Alejandro Fernandez, argued that the judge should take into account his client’s lifelong struggle with addiction.
“Here is someone who has lived in poverty his entire life, and who admits his helplessness in the face of addiction,” Fernandez wrote in the defense’s sentencing memorandum, asking for the floor of the agreed-upon range, seven years.
Citing research, Fernandez quoted researchers who wrote that “we have spent lavishly on one response to drug use — longer and longer prison sentences — and it has been an abject failure.”
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford sentenced Gagne to 120 months in prison, followed by a three-year term of supervised release.
The federal prison term will run concurrently with several Vermont cases, including four closed cases from 2012 through 2018, two dismissed cases from 2024 and 2026, and a 36-month sentence imposed Thursday in Windsor County Superior Court for attempting to elude police and negligent operation in Hartford in 2024.
