‘Friend’ who sold fatal drugs off to state prison

Carly Louise Boyland and Bradley Reed had several things in common.

Both were graduates of Perkiomen Valley High School in Collegeville, Montgomery County, Boyland in 2018 and Reed eight years before in 2010. Both lived in northern Chester County, Boyland outside Phoenixville and Reed in Spring City. Both worked in the restaurant industry, Boyland at Molly Maguire’s in Phoenixville and Reed at the Brickside Restaurant in Pottstown.

But there is one significant difference between the two: Reed is alive today, and Boyland is dead.

Unfortunately, both were among other things also drug users, and according to court records, Reed’s desire to act as a drug sharing “friend” to Boyland played a major role in her April 2019 death. Police say he sold her four small bags of heroin that was laced with the deadly opioid fentanyl, which, when she ingested it at the home she shared with a boyfriend, caused her to overdose and die, one of 104 people in the county to do so from accidental overdose that year.

Last week, Reed, 28, pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter and possession with intent to deliver in Common Pleas Court before Judge

Jeffery Sommer. At the end of an emotional proceedings at which members of both Boyland’s and Reed’s family addressed the judge and Reed offered his apologies for Boyland’s death, Sommer sentenced him to incarceration in state prison.

In ordering him sentenced to three to six years in prison on Wednesday, Sommer rejected the recommendation of Reed’s defense attorney, John Walsh of Philadelphia, that he be allowed to remain in Chester County Prison, where he has been held since his arrest two days after Boyland succumbed, and afterwards be sent to a sober living facility for rehabilitation. Sommer also dismissed arguments that Reed was not “a real drug dealer” who profited off his sale of narcotics, and that he had taken steps to accept responsibility for the girl’s death.

The judge instead agreed with the prosecution,

led by Chief Deputy District Attorney Michelle Frei, that even though he had confessed to investigators that he had sold heroin to Boyland the day before she died, he had fought the case at virtually every step of the way before pleading guilty. He did not waive a preliminary hearings in the matter, Frei pointed, out, and had filed pre-trial motions asking, among other things, that the very confession he pointed to as proof of his remorse in the case be suppressed.

Reed “poisoned” Boyland with the drugs he sold her, Frei wrote in a sentencing memo, in which she asked Sommer to impose a prison term of 45 to 90 months. She said his claim of not being “a real drug dealer” was offensive to the conscience of the community ...

“Every delivery of drugs is circulation of poison into our neighborhoods,” Frei wrote. “His delivery of fentanyl resulted in the death

of someone he considered a friend. If Carly Boyland’s death has not made him aware of the seriousness of his crimes, nothing will.”

According to court documents, Boyland, who was 19 at the time, was found unconscious on April 9, 2019 in the home she shared with Talon Hunter Schimpf on Greenhill Lane in Schuylkill. An officer who responded to the scene, Eric Shallis, tried to revive her by administering the anti-overdose drug Narcan, but was unsuccessful. Schimpf told investigators that the day before she had taken an Uber to Spring City, and was able to show them the ride history to where she had gone.

Police, including lead investigator Corporal Brian McCarthy, were able to look at text messages and Facebook posts that showed she had been in contact with Reed prior to going to Spring City. She had made arrangements to buy four bags of heroin

from Reed for $30, and had gone there shorty before 7 p.m. on April 8. Before she left Reed’s home, the two both used some of the heroin she bought from him, then went out for a hamburger.

When confronted by police, including McCarthy and Chester County detective Kristen Lund, Reed gave a voluntary statement in which he admitted giving her the four bags of heroin, two of which were found empty at her home after her death.

In his memo to Sommer, Walsh contended that the circumstances of Reed’s delivery of the fatal heroin to Boyland was evidence that he was simply trying to win friends.

“The persona that he had with his friends was used to feed his addiction and also provide him a social life as he believed that this service was a reason for his ‘friends’ to interact with him,” Walsh wrote. “He is not the ‘drug dealer’

who buys large quantities of narcotics and then cuts and bags up the drugs for large distribution. The victims’s death was a tragic accident.”

But members of Boyland’s family and several of her friend who wrote letters to Sommer prior to the sentencing had another word to describe Reed — “a monster.

“He deserves years behind bars,” said Ann Zimmerman, Boyland’s mother, in her email to Frei that was included in the prosecutor’s sentencing memo. “He made a clear choice to take these risks to make himself some money.

“My daughter has no choices left,” Zimmerman said. “My beautiful vibrant daughter deserves better. Nothing will bring her back. Nothing will ever ease my pain. This monster deserves no breaks.”