‘I’m worried about you,’ judge tells addict

WEST CHESTER >> Chester County Common Pleas Court Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft was worried.

Standing before her was a 21-year-old heroin addict who was waiting to be sentenced for selling $10 worth of the drug to a casual acquaintance who had died sometime after using what he bought. And although the man was accepting some bit of responsibility for what happened in the case, Wheatcraft sensed he did not quite understand all of what was going on around him.

Was he remorseful? Did he acknowledge the role he had played in the man’s death? What was he going to do to address his own addiction? Did he understand the dangers of falling to temptation and using again? All of those questions went through Wheatcraft’s mind as she looked across at the man from her perch on the bench.

“I am worried about you,” she said. “I am not quite sure you get it.

“I am afraid we are setting you up for failure,” Wheatcraft told defendant Hassan Sherif, who had pleaded guilty to charges of possession with intent to deliver heroin and recklessly endangering another person, with a time-served sentence that would see him paroled to the street immediately after court on Wednesday.

“Do you have a concern for yourself?” she asked Sherif. He had acknowledged that a stay in drug rehab at Guadenzia House earlier this year had ended unsuccessfully, but his sentence, including 23 month of parole and two years of probation, carried with it no court-ordered treatment. “You need to make a decision as to whether you want to stay alive. If you don’t invest yourself in treatment, I will be seeing you again, and we’ll do it my way. You wont necessarily like it, but it will be for your own good.

“And if you get arrested for selling drugs again, it will be very bad for you, noting that the felony drug charge he pleaded guilty to carried with it a maximum sentence of 15 years in state prison.

The judge, who has served as head of the county’s Drug Court program for about one year, has seen and heard of countless overdoses, some fatal. “I am trying to scare you a little bit, not as punishment,” she said, but as preparation for life on the outside of prison. “I see a lot like you. The victim in this case was a lot like you. I hope you take this very, very seriously.”

Time will now tell whether Wheatcraft’s admonitions to Sherif will help get him through the coming years of his life, on and off parole and probation. He expressed confidence that he could stay clean and sober. “I am tired of being on drugs, and I have the support of my family,” he said.

Sherif, 21, of West Goshen, was arrested in February and charged with felony drug delivery resulting in death. West Chester Police Detective Robert Kuehn had charged him in the investigation into the Dec. 5 overdose death of 21-year-old Andrew Monroe of East Bradford. He was found dead sitting in his car at the home he shared with his parents.

Kuehn was able to track an empty bag or heroin from Monroe to Sherif using telephone records, and interviewed Sherif in January. Sherif told the detective that he had met Monroe only twice prior to his death — once to smoke crack cocaine with a mutual friend in the parking lot of the Exton Square Mall and the second tine after Monroe called him looking for heroin. Sherif told Kuehn that he regularly would travel to the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia to buy heroin, which he would use himself and sell to others to fund his purchase.

On Dec. 3, he sold Monroe a packet of the drug for $10. The baggie was stamped with the name Santa Muerte — “Our Lady of Holy Death.”

Assistant District Attorney Michelle Barone of the DA’s Drug Unit, in presenting the plea agreement she had worked out with Sherif’s attorney, John Pavloff of Kennett Square, said that the charge of drug delivery resulting in death had been withdrawn after examining all the factors of the case, which included some obstacles in proving that the bag of heroin that Sherif sold to Monroe had been the direct cause of his fatal overdose.

Barone said, however, that she had discussed the resolution of the case with Kuehn and with Monroe’s parents, and that all agreed that it was appropriate. Thomas and Dana Monroe sat in the back of the courtroom and watched the proceedings, but did not formally address Wheatcraft.

As the judge saw it, however, the plea did not provide her with assurance that Sherif would be under orders to go to inpatient or outpatient treatment, and his manner — he called Monroe’s death “unfortunate” — suggested that he didn’t take the matter as seriously as he should.

“How many people have you known who died because of heroin?” Wheatcraft asked Sherif during their dialogue about the case. “Three or four,” he answered, adding hat he had overdosed himself on two prior occasions but survived.

“I have never asked that question and got an answer of zero,” the judge told him. “That says something. You need to make a decision as to whether you want to stay alive. I would hope you have a new appreciation for the dangers of the delivery of heroin.”

“I do feel very badly,” Sherif said. “I feel bad for his parents. That’s their son. No one deserves to die at that age.”