commentary by Patrick H. Moore
One of the big problems with doing heavy drugs is that sooner or later either you or somebody you know is going to wind up dead. And like it says in the Bible, “You don’t know the minute or the hour.” In a sense, you might almost be better off if you’re the one who winds up dead. Then, disposing of your corpse is somebody else’s problem.
Being confronted with this problem has always been a hassle, but in our modern era of advanced Social Media is all the tougher. Now you not only face the thorny problem of disposing of the stiff, but you also gotta decide (and quickly) how best to inform the cyber-world. Do you simply post it on FB and be done with it? Or do you tweet? Instagram is always an option. You can even Pin It which does seem fitting because photos of dead bodies are very common on Pinterest.
A 24-year-old Joplin, Missouri meth head, Chelsie Berry, was faced with this problem just last week when a weight-lifting friend of hers named Dennis “Nathan” Meyer injected a few too many Dilaudid (a powerful synthetic opiate) and expired right their in her car somewhere in Newton County.
The Smoking Gun has the story:
After their friend apparently died of a drug overdose, two Missouri residents posed for a “selfie” with the corpse, an image that one of them later uploaded to Facebook after dumping the body on a rural road, according to police.
As detailed in a probable cause affidavit, Chelsie Berry, 24, told cops that she was driving around with Dennis “Nathan” Meyer last week when he began acting “crazy” after injecting himself with the pain killer Dilaudid.
When the stiff jolt of Dilaudid apparently lowered Nathan’s inhibitions (let your imagination be your guide), Chelsie naturally got stressed out. She quickly phoned one of Nathan’s friends, a swinging dick named Jared Prier whom she had met the previous evening. Chelsea told Jared that Nathan seemed “unstable” and that he was making her nervous. Prier, who seems amiable enough, told Chelsie he’d be glad to help out and (because this is America), he picked her up at a neighborhood McDonald’s, so they did what good American’s do at McDonald’s, they “hung out in the parking lot for a little bit” (by this point Nathan was apparently unconscious). Of course, they didn’t yet realize Nathan was a “goner”, Chelsea believed he was simply “passed out.”
Jared and Chelsie then drove to a convenience store, possibly to pick up some Red Bull, which, they may have thought, might wake Nathan back up if they could get him to imbibe some. At some point, the cruel truth dawned on Jared and he told Chelsie that “he believed that Nathan had quit breathing.” Chelsie later told the police that she was concerned and that she also “checked Nathan and did not think he was breathing either.”
When making her statement, Chelsie explained to the police that she and Jared were “scared to call for an ambulance and did not want to take Nathan to a hospital because she and Jared were high on meth and Xanax and thought they would get in trouble.”
(As an aside, combining Xanax with meth seems to make good sense because Xanax, which effectively reduces anxiety in most people, should reduce paranoia in meth heads.)
At a certain point, Chelsie and Jared realized that Nathan’s “gig was up” and that they better ditch what was left of him. So they drove to a back road and “dragged Nathan from the front seat to the back seat because they did not want to look at him any longer and also the fact that he began to smell bad.”
Now this sounds like paranoia, Xanax notwithstanding. Based on my scant knowledge, I believe it takes up to 24 hours for a stiff to become odorous, even in humid Missouri weather.
According to Newton County Sheriff Ken Copeland, before they moved Nathan’s body from the front to the back seat, they did the honorable thing and posed for a “selfie” with their 30-year-old deceased friend. They then decided Facebook was the way to go and posted the picture on the social media giant. This turned out to be a mistake because “a tipster subsequently alerted investigators to the photo after Berry uploaded it to Facebook, according to Copeland, who added that the image showed Berry, Prier, and the “passed out” Meyer in the front seat of Meyer’s Nissan Pathfinder.”
Berry told police that once she and Jared had fulfilled their social media obligations, they drove around “looking for a place to dump the body,” finally settling on a rural driveway where they “pushed the body out of the vehicle onto the ground.” According to an autopsy, Meyer’s “breathing would have been faint and it would have taken a while for Nathan to die.”
Berry and Prier were charged yesterday with abandonment of a corpse, a Class “D” felony under Missouri law which could result in a year or more in state prison. In addition, according to some reports, they have been charged with voluntary manslaughter which would greatly increase their prison exposure.
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Although I take a certain amount of sadistic pleasure in goofing on these poor lost souls, the moral to this story is that hard drugs are very dangerous and it’s a good idea to give them a wide berth. Of course, “dopers” don’t always take kindly to good advice. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be “dopers”.
