Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre

Author:Eric Eyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

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With the jury trial in the state’s suit against AmerisourceBergen set to start in six weeks, the distributors had to find someone to rebut Sergeant Mike Smith’s testimony. Their lawyers had spent nine hours drilling Smith on their home turf, and he wouldn’t give an inch. The distributors hired Mary Rochee, a retired DEA agent with twenty-eight years of service. Between 2007 and 2013—her last assignment before retirement—she led a DEA field office’s antidiversion program, with responsibility for curbing the flow of pain pills to dealers and abusers. The field office’s territory covered the District of Columbia and three neighboring states, including West Virginia. The distributors were paying her $300 an hour as an expert witness. For years, she was in charge of stopping the drug problem in West Virginia, and now she was working for the companies accused of starting it.

Cagle trekked to downtown Philadelphia in October 2016, to the offices of one of the premier law firms in the city, where he’d have a chance to question Rochee under oath and take her deposition before she took the stand in Boone County in January. He had to figure out a way to disprove Rochee’s claims about the causes of the state’s prescription drug problem before she testified in front of the jury. His work was cut out for him. AmerisourceBergen couldn’t have found a better witness to toe the company line. Before being promoted to a management job at the DEA, Rochee was a frontline investigator in West Virginia. She had worked cases with Mike Smith. She was on a first-name basis with employees at the state medical and pharmacy boards, at the poison control center and medical examiner’s office, and at the US Attorney’s Office in Charleston. She also had won three awards for exceptional service.

Cagle was going to challenge her assertion that distributors weren’t at fault for the flood of drugs into the state, but rather drug traffickers who brought the addictive pills from Florida and West Virginians themselves who traveled to out-of-state pharmacies only to return and sell their stash of painkillers in towns and hollows.

“Just a couple of things,” Cagle said at the start. “If I ask you a question, as I often do, I’ll lapse into tongues. It’s religious, and you may not understand what I say. If you don’t understand it, please ask me to repeat it, and I will repeat it, and I will accord you that courtesy, OK?”

Cagle cracked a grin, but nobody laughed. The Philadelphia lawyers in the room didn’t know what to make of the hillbilly attorney from West Virginia.

“All right. Thank you,” Rochee said. It was her first time as an expert witness, though she had testified about investigations in her capacity as a DEA agent. Weeks earlier, she had put together a three-page report on West Virginia’s prescription drug problem, after reading news articles, research papers, and Mike Smith’s deposition. AmerisourceBergen shared the report with Cagle. Rochee spotlighted her participation in a confidential DEA operation called the Special Field Intelligence Project in 2010.

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