Pill sales lead to six months in jail

A Springfield woman suspected of selling as much as a $168,000 worth of oxycodone tablets before she was picked up during last year’s “Operation Precision Valley” arrest sweep was sentenced Monday.
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Tammy O’Brien, 38, of Springfield, will spend six months in jail after pleading guilty to a charge of sale of a narcotic in White River Junction criminal court. Photo: PHOTO By ERIC FRANCISPublished April 22, 2014 in the Rutland Herald Pill sales lead to six months in jail By ERIC FRANCIS CORRESPONDENT WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A Springfield woman suspected of selling as much as a $168,000 worth of oxycodone tablets before she was picked up during last year’s “Operation Precision Valley” arrest sweep was sentenced Monday. Tammy O’Brien, 38, pleaded guilty in White River Junction criminal court to one felony count of sale of a narcotic and had asked through her attorney that she only be required to do time on the state Department of Corrections work crew for two months, citing the impact of her doing jail time on her young children. Judge Karen Carroll rejected that request for leniency, saying she sympathized with the plight of O’Brien’s children but she said O’Brien had to have known that could happen when she was making a profit by preying on the addictions of her neighbors in Springfield. “The defendant was selling extreme amounts of pills,” Carroll said, calling O’Brien’s actions “alarming and fairly disgusting” especially since O’Brien confessed to detectives after she was caught that she was doing it for the money and not because of addictions of her own. “This has had a very major effect on the community of Springfield,” Carroll said, telling O’Brien that the “Number One reason is deterrence” as she imposed six months of jail time and four years of probation. O’Brien appeared visibly upset during Monday’s hearing, shaking in her chair at times and holding her head, as both the judge and Vermont Assistant Attorney General Evan Meenan took turns describing her behavior — distributing what she admitted to an informant was 495 oxycodone pills during just one three-day period last spring — as reprehensible. Detectives said O’Brien was charging addicts $35 per pill which Meenan said he calculated, based on O’Brien’s own report of the volumes she’d been selling, at between $140,000 and $168,000 worth of cash O’Brien had collected from area residents. Meenan acknowledged that O’Brien’s cut of those illicit funds was a fraction of that total but he said that “almost everyone in Vermont knows someone who has been burglarized” by drug addicts in recent years and he said that sort of criminal activity was almost certainly the source of much of the money that had passed through O’Brien’s hands before she was arrested by the Vermont Drug Task Force.