Guilty verdict in Willistown overdose case

WEST CHESTER >> A Chester County Common Pleas Court jury deliberated less than two hours last week before returning with a verdict of guilty in the case of a Philadelphia man who authorities said sold a Chester County man fentanyl-laced heroin blamed for his overdose death.

The jury of six men and six women returned to Judge David Bortner’s courtroom about 3 p.m. on Thursday after having begun their deliberations at 12:30 p.m. The found defendant Jamal Abdul Keys guilty of drug delivery resulting in death, a felony, as well as possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance and criminal use of a communications facility, also felonies.

In a related case, the panel found Keys guilty on drug delivery charges and conspiracy, stemming from a sting operation set up by police to lure the person who had sold the fatal doses of fentanyl-laced heroin to the victim, a 34-year-old Paoli man, into custody.

Keys, 43, has been held in Chester County Prison since his arrest in 2019, and will be sentenced at a later date.

The case against Keys that was presented to the jury by Assistant District Attorneys Michelle Thurstlic-O’Neill and Jessica Acito was largely circumstantial, a fact emphasized by defense attorney Michael Noone of West Chester, in his representation of Keys.

There were no eyewitnesses that saw Keys deliver the fatal heroin to Drew Martin, the man who was found dead in a relatives home in Willistown. And when police contacted the phone number of the drug dealer Martin had contacted to get the heroin via the sting, the man who showed up to sell more of the drugs turned out to be someone other than Keys.

“I would argue that in this case the District Attorney’s Office did not get you close to knowing that your verdict would be beyond a reasonable doubt,” Noone said in his closing argument. “There is reasonable doubt all over the place.”

But as Thurstlic-O’Neill explained to the jury, circumstantial evidence can be just as damning against a defendant as direct evidence, and a sound basis for a verdict of guilty.

Circumstantial evidence is the presence of a fact that one can reliably use to infer other facts, the prosecutor said. If her two children are playing together out of sight and one later appears covered in magic-marker colors,

while the other has markers in her hand, she would not have needed to see the coloring done to know who was guilty of the mess, she told the panel.

“The evidence in this case point to only one person, the defendant,” she said.

Keys, a man with a string of arrests and convictions of selling drugs and weapons violations, was charged on July 10, 2019 with Martin’s fatal overdose.

At the time, his arrest was thought to be the first such case brought by police in Willistown, among the most affluent municipalities in Chester County, and represented a level of cooperation with other police agencies in the county, including the Chester County Multi-Juristictional Drug Task Force, according to a criminal complaint filed by Detective Stephen Jones, the lead investigator in the case.

“The abuse of opioids is taking lives and devastating families,” said Willistown Chief John Narcise in a statement following the arrest. “This is a sad example of how this crisis is impacting not only our country, but Chester County.”

On April 1, 2019 township police were called to a home on Devon Drive in Paoli, a quiet stretch of road north of the Waynesborough Country Club. There, officers found a man who had last been seen alive three days before, on March 29, lying in his bed. The family members who called police said they had found 14 packets of heroin next to his body. He had been dead for more than 24 hours, a deputy coroner told officers.

The man’s uncle said he had seen the victim, whose name was not included in the complaint, in his bed on March 30 and March 31, but had assumed he was sleeping.

The victim was a 2002 graduate of Downingtown High School, described in his obituary as “a talented carpenter and woodworker, (who) had an affection for cars and music, and loved playing the guitar.”

According to Jones’ complaint against Keys, a forensics download of the victim’s phone found messages exchanged between him and a person known as “Mal” in the days before his death. The two discussed the victim’s purchase of heroin from Mal in March, including a sale made to the victim’s at his parents’ home outside Phoenixville, about which he complained that the quality of the heroin was “the worst I’ve had in almost a year.”

“Mal” agreed to sell the victim more heroin, and set up a meeting between him and the victim on March 29 at a fast food restaurant in North Philadelphia. The two met, and Mal sold the victim 14 bags of heroin for $100. Using the GPS locations on his cellphone, police were able to establish that the victim had been at the restaurant on Lehigh Avenue that afternoon.

Further texts sent to the victim’s phone from Mal went unanswered. He was last seen alive the evening of March 29.

Following the death, Jones worked with Phoenixville Detective Thomas Hyland to attempt to lure Mal into meeting with him, as Hyland pretended to be the victim. The two arranged a time for “Mal” to come to the victim’s parents’ home on April 3 with heroin to sell. But when the time came, it was another man who arrived, Akita Norton, calling himself “Mal’s brother.” A check of his phone by police showed Key’s phone number.

Jones was eventually able to interview a friend of the victim, who told him that the victim had previously discussed buying heroin from “Mal,” who he thought was a man named Jamal from Philadelphia who had recently been released from prison. Hyland, a veteran narcotics officer in the county, was able to identify Keys as a possible suspect, his having been released from prison in Philadelphia on a drug delivery charge in October.

A check of Keys’ phone number showed it to be the same as the one “Mal” used to communicate with the victim.

At the time, the case was noted by the had of the county’s Opioid Task Force as a prime example of the cooperation shown by law enforcement agencies in the county in making an arrest in a fatal drug case.

“This was excellent teamwork by law enforcement,” the official said. “Arresting and prosecuting those who profit off of other people’s addiction is a key component to battling this epidemic.

The official, coincidentally, was Noone, then the county’s First Assistant District Attorney.