Pennsylvania cops charged a man's girlfriend in his overdose death. His mom thinks that's wrong.
YORK, Pa. — Brandy Lehr never liked any of her son’s girlfriends, and Samantha Criswell was no exception.
Her son, Tracy Beck, had been in the relationship for a couple of months. Criswell, she said, was fun and let him be him. They were enjoying life.
On Aug. 8, 2019, Beck and Criswell were at a home in Lower Windsor Township located in York. He provided what he believed was heroin but turned out to be fentanyl, an opioid that can be 50 times stronger than morphine. She gave him methamphetamine.
Later, Criswell awoke to find him unresponsive on the bathroom floor. She dragged him into the shower in an attempt to wake him up.
When that didn’t work, Criswell administered naloxone, an opioid antidote that’s commonly marketed under the brand name Narcan. She started CPR and called 911. But it was too late.
Beck died of mixed substance toxicity, an autopsy would reveal. He was 22.
More than one year later, the Lower Windsor Township Police Department charged Criswell, 31, of Marietta, Pennsylvania, with drug delivery resulting in death: a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 to 40 years in prison.
But Lehr doesn’t think the law is right. Law enforcement, she said, should focus on drug dealers and suppliers — not people who have substance use disorders.
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Her view highlights one of the main criticisms of drug-induced homicide laws in the United States: that these statutes don't capture drug kingpins, but instead sweep up family members, friends and loved ones in the throes of addiction who could have just as easily overdosed and died themselves.
“It’s like the police and the government are just picking the dying flowers out of our garden,” Lehr said. “What about the weeds that are strangling them?”
'He was always a wild one'
Tracy William Beck was born on June 7, 1997, in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Beck, his mother said, was a “wild child.” He was great to his family, but he frequently got into trouble. He would spend a lot of time in juvenile detention or locked up.
As a baby, Beck never crawled. He sat there like a blob, his mother said, simply watching and taking in the world. Then, all of a sudden, he got up and took off running.
He loved spending time with family, his mother said, and animals. Beck would stop traffic if he saw a creature that was hurt, pick it up and seek help. He also enjoyed spending time outdoors. Fishing. Boating. Camping.
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Lehr described her son as an “adrenaline junkie.” He looked for “just any random craziness that would get his blood pumping.”
“He was always a wild one,” Lehr said. “He’d see something he wanted to do, and he’d just get up and do it.”
When he was in ninth grade at River Rock Academy, a school that serves dependent and delinquent youths in Adams and York counties, Beck asked to use the bathroom. The teacher refused. So, really having to go, he decided to use a plant. “It was really disturbing at the time. But now it’s kind of funny, like, he peed in a plant in front of his whole classroom,” Lehr said. “Who does that?”
One another occasion, Beck went to Walmart and walked out with a large flatscreen TV while he had soft casts around both of his wrists, which were broken. He set off the alarm, stopped, looked directly at a security camera and smiled.
Then, he continued on his way.
At 15, Beck jumped out of a tree onto a trampoline, bounced out of it and hit the bar at a friend’s home in Lower Windsor Township. The impact dislocated his shoulder and broke it in three places. Lehr called for an ambulance, and he later underwent emergency surgery.
Doctors, she said, prescribed him morphine tablets. When the pills stopped, her son reported that he was in pain. Lehr now thinks that he was experiencing withdrawal.
She said she feels like there were probably experimental times in that past that she was not aware of, but that episode, along with hanging around the wrong people, really kicked off her son’s addiction.
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Less than one year before his death, Beck was working on a friend’s car when it fell off the jack, smashing his face. “So obviously,” Lehr said, “there were more pills.”
For so long, she said, her son was doing well. But he relapsed.
More than 1-1/2 years after the deadly overdose, Criswell appeared in the York County Court of Common Pleas on June 28 and pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child — with no agreement in place on the sentence.
She replied to most of the judge’s questions with “Yes, your honor” and “No, your honor.” President Judge Maria Musti Cook then asked Criswell to explain what brought her to court.
Criswell said she and Beck bought drugs and got high together. She said she passed out, or fell asleep, and woke up six hours later.
“His lips were blue, and they were cold,” said Criswell, who added that she called 911, administered naloxone and performed CPR. “I couldn’t bring him back to life.”
Her 1-year-old son, she said, was in his crib in the bedroom at the time.
Lehr sat in the gallery of the courtroom in support. She said she thinks the law has been weaponized against people who are experiencing addiction.
“She didn’t talk him into anything. She didn’t make him do anything that he wasn’t going to do already,” Lehr said. “If anything, my son probably talked her into it.”
Criswell, she said, was experiencing addiction and just trying to get high. She didn’t sell him drugs, and he provided some to her.
Instead, Lehr wondered about the drug dealers who supplied Beck and Criswell: “Where are they? Not being charged.”
Outside the courtroom, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Melanie Wiesman declined to discuss the case before sentencing.
Criswell’s attorney, Chief Public Defender Bruce Blocher, also declined to comment.
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'We, the police, and law enforcement, share her frustration'
York County District Attorney Dave Sunday has stated that it will take a multi-pronged approach to address the opioid crisis. Drug delivery resulting in death, he has said, is only one tool that prosecutors have at their disposal — it’s not a panacea.
But Sunday has stated that his office has an ethical obligation to do everything in its power to protect the community and keep people from dying.
Lower Windsor Township Police Chief Dave Arnold said law enforcement continues to investigate Beck’s death.
Arnold said investigators have identified other persons of interest in the case. Police, he said, will still look for the people who supplied the deadly dose of drugs as long as there are leads.
These are “extremely difficult investigations,” Arnold said. He likened working them to homicides. Drugs are illegal, he said, and it’s time-consuming and difficult to get people to cooperate.
“Believe me, we, the police, and law enforcement, share her frustration,” Arnold said. “It’s not for a lack of trying.”
Law enforcement, though, believed that it was appropriate to charge Criswell. That’s where the investigation led, Arnold said.
Police also reported that Criswell’s infant son was crawling on the ground. He picked up a plastic gum container that held an empty capsule and four pills. Law enforcement later tested the substances in them, which came back positive for fentanyl and benzodiazepines.
Arnold said it was only “by the grace of God” that the boy did not suffer serious bodily injury or death.
Said Arnold: “Her actions, again, could’ve led to somebody else’s death."
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Drug-induced homicide laws: 'They don't do justice'
Pennsylvania itself is an outlier when it comes to these prosecutions.
Between 1974 and 2018, Pennsylvania brought 781 drug-induced homicide charges — the most in the United States, according to data from the Health in Justice Action Lab at the Northeastern University School of Law. Ohio was No. 2 with 447, while Wisconsin came in at No. 3 with 413.
About 50% of people accused in these cases nationwide between 2000 and 2017, the lab discovered, were caretakers, friends, family members or partners.
Prosecutors are under a lot of pressure to make it seem like they’re doing something to address the opioid crisis. But at the end of the day, these laws are often applied to people who are addicted to drugs and could have died themselves, said Jeremiah Goulka, a senior fellow and director of justice policy at the Health in Justice Action Lab.
Goulka described these statutes as counterproductive, adding that they dissuade people from using together so someone can intervene in the event of an overdose and calling 911.
The Good Samaritan Act provides immunity to people who report overdoses, provide their name and location and remain on the scene in some circumstances in Pennsylvania. One of the exceptions? Drug-induced homicide.
Law enforcement isn’t sending a message to drug kingpins, he said. People who are struggling with addiction, though, are hearing a message loud and clear: “Don’t call 911, because you might get a homicide charge.”
If people who are experiencing addiction also get locked up, Goulka said, they’re at a much greater risk of overdosing if they’re released without getting connected to medication-assisted treatment or continuing services on the outside.
Goulka said many families understand the landscape of addiction and do not want to see these prosecutions.
“Really, they’re tragic,” Goulka said of drug-induced homicide laws. “They don’t do justice. And they cause more people to die.”
People charged with drug delivery resulting in death have done nothing different than hundreds and hundreds of others who are facing regular drug-dealing offenses — except for the fact that someone happened to die, said Carrie Allman, homicide chief at the Montgomery County Public Defender’s Office.
No one, she said, intends for that to happen. Yet they’re treated significantly different in the criminal justice system, she said.
“We talk a lot about the opioid epidemic and the fact that it has impacted so many people,” Allman said. “But it seems like that concern sort of drifts away when we can find the individual who provided the drugs that caused someone’s death.”
“And I think we ignore that on any other given day, the person charged could’ve been the person who overdosed,” she added.
York County Senior Assistant Public Defender Diana Spurlin said she thinks that most people want to get drug dealers off the street. She is not involved in the Criswell case.
But Spurlin said she’s not sure what it accomplishes to charge friends and family members who have substance use disorder with drug delivery resulting in death — a law that, presumably, is meant to protect them.
“I just keep coming back to the, ‘Why?’” Spurlin said. “Just because you can prosecute somebody’s friend who used with them, does not mean that you should. That does not mean that’s justice.”
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That’s a subject that the federal appeals court that covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands recently examined.
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on June 1 ordered a new trial for a woman who was found guilty of distribution of heroin resulting in death and sentenced to 21 years in federal prison.
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Richards Roth wrote for the majority in overturning Emma Semler’s conviction and sentence that “distribute” in the federal Controlled Substances Act does not apply to people who jointly and simultaneously buy drugs for their personal use.
The Controlled Substances Act, the court held, was put in place to “curb the deleterious societal effect of drug trafficking activity.”
“The government would have us believe that if two drug addicts jointly and simultaneously purchase methamphetamine and return home to smoke it together, a ‘distribution’ has occurred each time the addicts pass the pipe back and forth to each other,” Roth said. “Such an interpretation diverts punishment from traffickers to addicts, who contribute to the drug trade only as end users and who already suffer disproportionally from its dangerous effects.”
The threat of harsh punishments could deter people from using together and put them more at risk. Because people commonly share drugs, the court ruled, such an interpretation could result in arbitrary enforcement.
Because the decision dealt with the language of the federal law, the ruling doesn’t have direct implications for state prosecutions, said Jonathan Fodi, counsel at Flannery Georgalis LLC in Pittsburgh, who previously served as an assistant district attorney in the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office for about 11 years.
He noted that he has not prosecuted or defended one of these cases.
But Fodi said he thinks that any defense attorney worth his or her salt will try to bring up the case, possibly in a pretrial motion. Even if the decision does not have direct, controlling authority, it could still contain persuasive value to a judge, he said.
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Roth noted, though, in the ruling that there could be some situations in which the law would still apply in a social setting. The court, she also emphasized, was not stating that Semler is not guilty — or that she and Jennifer Werstler jointly bought the lethal dose of heroin.
“We leave those questions of fact to a properly instructed jury on remand,” Roth said, “which may well convict Semler.”
'I'm taking her side'
In a recent interview, Lehr said she thinks that the police have worked hard. But she wishes that investigators went in a different direction, noting that she provided them with information.
Criswell, she said, is low-hanging fruit.
She said she wants Criswell to get help. Jail time doesn’t count as sober time and will simply delay the start of any mental health and drug treatment, Lehr said.
If events would have turned out differently, she said, her son could be the one who’s on trial. Lehr plans to attend Criswell’s sentencing hearing on Sept. 20 and give a statement on her behalf.
“Yeah, I’m taking her side,” Lehr said. “Like it or not — like her or not — she didn’t make Tracy do anything that Tracy didn’t want to do.”
Follow Dylan Segelbaum on Twitter: @Dylan_Segelbaum.