This is a story from "Rolling Stone" 2014, but it's an age old battle played out across America....
He was a friendless high school loner struggling with autism. So why did an undercover cop target him as a drug dealer?
BY SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY
February 26, 2014
Jesse Snodgrass plodded around yet another stucco corner, searching for Room 254 in time for the second-period bell, only to find he was lost yet again.
Jesse felt a familiar surge of panic. He was new to Chaparral High School and still hadn't figured out how to navigate the sprawling Southern California campus with its outdoor maze of identical courtyards studded with baby palm trees.
Gripping his backpack straps, the 17-year-old took some deep breaths. Gliding all around him were his new peers, chatting as they walked in slouchy pairs and in packs. Many of their mouths were turned up, baring teeth, which Jesse recognized as smiles, a signal that they were happy.
Once he regained his composure, he followed the spray-painted Chaparral Puma paw prints on the ground, his gait stiff and soldierly, and prayed that his classroom would materialize.
He was already prepared to declare his third day of school a disaster.
At last, Jesse found his art class, where students were milling about in the final moments before the bell. He had resigned himself to maintaining a dignified silence when a slightly stocky kid with light-brown hair ambled over and said, "Hi."
"Hi," Jesse answered cautiously. Nearly six feet tall, Jesse glanced down to scan the kid's heart-shaped face, and seeing the corners of his mouth were turned up, Jesse relaxed a bit.
The kid introduced himself as Daniel Briggs. Daniel told Jesse that he, too, was new to Chaparral – he'd just moved from Redlands, an hour away, to the suburb of Temecula – and, like Jesse, who'd recently relocated from the other side of town, was starting his senior year.
Jesse squinted and took a long moment to mull over Daniel's words. Meanwhile, Daniel sized up Jesse, taking in his muscular build and clenched jaw that topped off Jesse's skater-tough look: Metal Mulisha T-shirt, calf-length Dickies, buzz-cut hair and a stiff- brimmed baseball hat. A classic suburban thug.
Lowering his voice, Daniel asked if Jesse knew where he might be able to get some weed.
"Yeah, man, I can get you some," Jesse answered in his slow monotone, every word stretched out and articulated with odd precision. Daniel asked for his phone number, and Jesse obliged, his insides roiling with both triumph and anxiety.
On one hand, Jesse could hardly believe his good fortune: His conversation with Daniel would stand as the only meaningful interaction he'd have with another kid all day.
On the other hand, Jesse had no idea where to get marijuana. All Jesse knew in August 2012 was that he had somehow made a friend.
Though it smacks of suburban myth or TV makebelieve, undercover drug stings occur in high schools with surprising frequency, with self-consciously dopey names like "Operation D-Minus" and, naturally, "Operation Jump Street." They're elaborate stings in which adult undercover officers go to great lengths to pass as authentic teens: turning in homework, enduring detention, attending house parties and using current slang, having Googled the terms beforehand to ensure their correctness.
In Tennessee last year, a 22-year-old policewoman emerging from 10 months undercover credited her mom's job as an acting coach as key to her performance as a drug-seeking student, which was convincing enough to have 14 people arrested.
Other operations go even further to establish veracity, like a San Diego-area sting last year that practically elevated policing to performance art, in which three undercover deputies had "parents" who attended back-to-school nights; announcing the first of the sting's 19 arrests, Sheriff Bill Gore boasted this method of snaring teens was "almost too easy."
The practice was first pioneered in 1974 by the LAPD, which soon staged annual undercover busts that most years arrested scores of high schoolers; by the Eighties, it had spread as a favored strategy in the War on Drugs.
Communities loved it: Each bust generated headlines and reassured citizens that police were proactively combating drugs.
Cops loved the stings, too, which not only served as a major morale boost but could also be lucrative.
"Any increase in narcotics arrests is good for police departments. It's all about numbers," says former LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing, who now works with the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and views these operations with scorn.
"This is not about public safety – the public is no safer, and the school grounds are no safer. The more arrests you have, the more funding you can get through federal grants and overtime."
Yet despite the busts' popularity, their inner workings were shrouded in secrecy, with few details publicly released about their tactics and overall effectiveness. And as time went on, officers and school administrators became alarmed by the results they saw: large numbers of kids arrested for small quantities of drugs – and who, due to "zero tolerance" policies, were usually expelled from school.
No studies appear to exist on the efficacy of high school drug stings, but the data on undercover operations in general isn't encouraging.
A 2007 Department of Justice-funded meta-analysis slammed the practice of police sting operations, finding that they reduce crime for a limited time – three months to a year – if at all. "At best, they are a stopgap measure," and at worst, an expensive waste of police resources, which "may prevent the use of other, more effective problemsolving techniques." The federal study concludes that sting operations reap little more than one consistent benefit: "favorable publicity" for police.
To be sure, public-relations speed bumps have appeared now and again, like when a female LAPD narc allegedly romanced a high school football player, which surfaced via her steamy love letters, or when a developmentally disabled child was swept up in another L.A. bust after selling $9 worth of marijuana to an undercover.
But until now, no department seems to have gone so far as to lay a trap for an autistic kid.
From his seat at a worktable in the art room, Deputy Daniel Zipperstein observed his target and tablemate, Jesse Snodgrass. Like all the other students, Deputy Zipperstein was busily working on the day's class assignment, building a sculpture using cardboard, paper and wire, but Jesse was clearly flummoxed by the project's complexity.
Their ponytailed teacher, James Taylor, paused by the boys' table. "Jesse, OK," Taylor instructed, holding up a piece of cardboard. "Today's task will be to cut out six cardboard squares of this size."
Taylor took pains to pare down each assignment into bite-size chunks for Jesse, but even so, he'd need to keep circling back to remind Jesse to stay on his single small task.
Zipperstein watched Jesse slowly pick up the scissors and get to work.
No one at Chaparral High School knew that transfer student "Daniel Briggs" was in fact a cop in his mid-twenties; as is typical in such an investigation, only a few top district administrators were aware of the operation.
With Daniel's Billabong T-shirts, camo shorts and Vans, "he looked just like an average kid," remembers student Jessica Flores, then 17. Handsome and quick to smile, Daniel was meeting new friends with remarkable ease, though some students remained wary, due to his habit of interrupting strangers' conversations whenever the subject of drugs came up – for which he quickly acquired the nickname "Deputy Dan."
Madalyn Dunn, then 17, was startled while she chatted with friends during shop class, and the new kid leapt right in: "Are you talking about ketamine?"
Dan said, then asked if she'd sell him some, which she declined. Nonetheless, the two wound up walking to fourth period together, bonding over their fondness for pot.
After that, Madalyn says, Daniel wouldn't stop asking her for drugs.
"Oh, come on," he'd pester.
Deputy Dan was just as aggressive with Jesse Snodgrass, pursuing the friendless boy outside the confines of school. Jesse's mom, Catherine, and his dad, Doug, an engineer, had been delighted when Jesse had come home talking about his new friend from art class; they'd been even more surprised when Daniel had started buzzing Jesse's otherwisesilent phone with texts.
Jesse had only ever had one friend before, another special-ed kid who'd recently moved to Alabama, leaving Jesse bereft. And now that Jesse had switched to a new school – a move foisted upon the Snodgrasses when their old house had gone into foreclosure – he had been especially agitated lately. It was only the latest distress in a lifetime of everyday struggles, which Catherine and Doug did their best to help Jesse navigate, fighting the constant battles waged by the parents of children on the autism spectrum: sticking up for him when he was ostracized from playgrounds or asked to leave restaurants as a child; standing up to school districts to secure Jesse equal access to education.
Though the Snodgrasses also had two younger children at home, Jesse's needs had long made him a focal point. They were ready for his life to get easier and were thrilled with the calming prospect of this new friendship.
"Why don't you tell Daniel to come over?" Catherine urged.
"OK." Jesse hunched over his phone as his mom drove him home through the clean streets of Temecula – a planned suburban community northeast of San Diego, population 100,000 – past the big-box strip malls and into their neighborhood of Mediterranean-style homes, where a man-made duck pond sparkled and joggers bounced past.
Jesse's phone vibrated. "He can't do it today, he's grounded," Jesse recited.
Made sense to him. Daniel had already told Jesse that he was always in trouble with his strict mom, a conflict that left him superstressed – which was why Daniel "really needed" Jesse to hook him up with some pot.
"Maybe another time. You guys could order pizza, play video games, just hang out," Catherine said.
Forging friendships was normally so hard for Jesse, who had the cognitive skills of an 11-year-old and was nearly oblivious to the facial expressions, body language, vocal tones and other contextual cues that make up basic social interactions. He was slow to draw inferences or interpret the casual idioms other kids used, like "catch you later," a phrase Jesse had initially found startling, since it turned out to involve no catching whatsoever.
As a toddler, he'd once been terrified for days after his preschool teacher told him, "I'll keep my eye on you."
Jesse had seemed typical enough until age two. Then words started disappearing from his vocabulary, and he spoke in a sporadic, garbled language. His parents grew worried: Their young son made no eye contact and scarcely registered the presence of other people, but drew hundreds of pictures of their vacuum cleaner and would spend hours waving a crayon in front of his face, entranced by the fan of color it etched in the air.
When Jesse was five, a neurologist diagnosed him with Asperger's syndrome, a variant of autism; over the years, Jesse's diagnoses would expand to include Tourette's, bipolar disorder and depression.
An evaluator prepared the Snodgrasses for the possibility that Jesse might never speak again.
Catherine quit her advertising job to plunge Jesse into intensive autism therapies. Amazingly, the interventions got him back on track enough that he was able to attend regular school, taking special-ed classes and mainstream electives, with a counseling team to help him manage.
But Jesse's difficulties were hardly over. He was bullied throughout middle school, mocked as a "retard." He lashed out at his tormentors and, in doing so, developed a discipline record, with suspensions for fighting and many a day penalized in "lunch club," scraping gum from under desks.
Jesse rarely complained about his mistreatment; he was a boy who didn't think to ask for help. Instead, he vented his frustrations with episodes of headbanging, scratching and punching himself, violent and bloody bursts of self-injury.
It took Jesse years of therapy to wean himself from those self-injurious impulses and soothe himself instead with benign motor tics like wringing his hands or snapping his fingers when he felt anxious.
He also found another way to cope.
During his sophomore year of high school, Jesse shaved his head, began lifting weights and developed a new persona his therapist Jason Agnetti came to call his "bro identity."
Dressed in wife-beaters that showed off his biceps, saggy jeans and baseball caps, Jesse would stomp around school, dropping f-bombs and calling other kids "retards." He talked about extreme sports like motocross, off-roading and skateboarding, even though in reality he couldn't ride a bike or even tie his own shoelaces.
In his junior year, Jesse drew a bong on his notebook and called himself "Jesse Smokegrass," despite his inexperience with pot.
By emulating the bad-boy swagger of his own bullies, Jesse was putting on a suit of armor.
Though his parents were a little concerned – and irritated with all his unnecessary posing – they saw it as a phase and, in that regard, not unlike other powerful antagonistic personae Jesse had identified with in the past.
"There was a period of time when he was really obsessed with the Undertaker, the wrestler," says Doug. "And in fourth grade, he was obsessed with Bowser in Super Mario."
To some extent, the bro disguise worked, making Jesse less approachable and even, from a distance, menacing. Anyone who took a closer look, however, could see past the facade.
As he strode the halls of Chaparral, with his robot walk and compulsive fingersnapping, it was clear that something was amiss. "You could see right away that there's something off about him," says Perry Pickett, who at the time was a Chaparral junior.
And as soon as Jesse spoke with his flat affect, slow response time and inability to follow any but the simplest instructions – his impairment was obvious.
And yet Deputy Dan was unrelenting.
As the weeks went by and Jesse continued to stall, Daniel sent Jesse 60 text messages, hounding him to deliver on his promise to get marijuana.
"He was pretty much stalking me," remembers Jesse. "With the begging for the drugs and everything, it was kind of a drag."
Already anxious about his new home and new school, Jesse was conflicted. He knew he didn't really want to get marijuana for Daniel – not that he even knew how – and that the drug requests were ratcheting up his anxiety to an intolerable level. But Jesse also desperately wanted Daniel to like him and didn't want to fail his new friend.
Daniel's oft-stated plight that his home life made him so unhappy that he needed to self-medicate struck a certain chord with Jesse, who also needed pharmaceuticals in order to function.
"I take medication for my own issues,"
Jesse confessed to Daniel, rattling them off: Depakote, Lamictal, Clonazepam.
Burdened by his sense of obligation, frightened and helpless, the pressure was too much for Jesse to handle. One day the turmoil had been so great that after art class, Jesse fled to the boys' bathroom and burned his arm with a lighter.
Three weeks into the school year, Doug and Catherine Snodgrass held a meeting with Jesse's educational-support team, in light of Jesse's self-inflicted burn, to discuss their son's transition to Chaparral.
"They were concerned about him building friendships at the school," attendee Delfina Gomez, Jesse's behavioral- health specialist, would later testify.
Unaware that Jesse was being befriended by a narc, the team assured the Snodgrasses that overseeing Jesse was a priority for them, including finding him "a classroom buddy, peer buddy or peer leader."
Elsewhere in the building that same day,
Daniel pressed $20 into Jesse's hand. "I'll see what I can get you," Jesse told him. I'm gonna meet Daniel before class,"
Jesse told his father five days later while on the drive to school. He bent to read the screen of his phone. "Take me to the Outback Steakhouse." Jesse was jumpy. He'd asked Daniel to come over to his house for the marijuana handoff, but Daniel was insisting on meeting at a strip mall adjacent to Chaparral's ball fields. Daniel's car was already parked in the empty lot when Doug and Jesse arrived at 7:10 a.m. Jesse leapt out of the station wagon.
"Stay here," Jesse instructed his father. Doug, proud of his son's social accomplishment, contented himself with a friendly wave at the young fellow before driving off.
Daniel waved back.
The previous weekend, saddled with Daniel's $20 bill, Jesse had agonized over how to get his hands on some pot. At last, the answer hit him. The medicalÂmarijuana dispensary in downtown Temecula sold marijuana! Jesse congratulated himself on his logic. He and his family often spent leisurely afternoons browsing downtown's pedestrian thoroughfare, where Jesse would branch off for an hour of solo exploration before reconnecting at the Root Beer Company for sodas.
Sure enough, that weekend Jesse wandered toward the dispensary and approached a pale man with bad skin and longish hair – "he kind of had that look of a junkie," Jesse says – who took his $20 and, to Jesse's infinite relief, handed him a clear sandwich baggie with weed inside.
Now, standing with Daniel beside his car and in a hurry to get this nerve-racking errand over with, Jesse thrust the precious stash into his hands.
Daniel glanced at it. It was a pathetic half-gram of dried-up flakes – about five dollars' worth of marijuana, maybe enough to roll a single skinny joint. Still, Daniel seemed satisfied. He threw it in his glove compartment and suggested they get to class.
Later that day, Deputy Zipperstein handed off the baggie to another deputy, who transported it to a police station, where the drugs were field-tested by yet another officer, then ceremoniously weighed, photographed and tagged as evidence:
SUS –SNODGRASS, JESSE $20/.6 GRAM MARIJUANA BUY #1.
The picture was transferred onto CD for posterity.
Read The Full Story Here
He was a friendless high school loner struggling with autism. So why did an undercover cop target him as a drug dealer?
BY SABRINA RUBIN ERDELY
February 26, 2014
Jesse Snodgrass plodded around yet another stucco corner, searching for Room 254 in time for the second-period bell, only to find he was lost yet again.
Jesse felt a familiar surge of panic. He was new to Chaparral High School and still hadn't figured out how to navigate the sprawling Southern California campus with its outdoor maze of identical courtyards studded with baby palm trees.
Gripping his backpack straps, the 17-year-old took some deep breaths. Gliding all around him were his new peers, chatting as they walked in slouchy pairs and in packs. Many of their mouths were turned up, baring teeth, which Jesse recognized as smiles, a signal that they were happy.
Once he regained his composure, he followed the spray-painted Chaparral Puma paw prints on the ground, his gait stiff and soldierly, and prayed that his classroom would materialize.
He was already prepared to declare his third day of school a disaster.
At last, Jesse found his art class, where students were milling about in the final moments before the bell. He had resigned himself to maintaining a dignified silence when a slightly stocky kid with light-brown hair ambled over and said, "Hi."
"Hi," Jesse answered cautiously. Nearly six feet tall, Jesse glanced down to scan the kid's heart-shaped face, and seeing the corners of his mouth were turned up, Jesse relaxed a bit.
The kid introduced himself as Daniel Briggs. Daniel told Jesse that he, too, was new to Chaparral – he'd just moved from Redlands, an hour away, to the suburb of Temecula – and, like Jesse, who'd recently relocated from the other side of town, was starting his senior year.
Jesse squinted and took a long moment to mull over Daniel's words. Meanwhile, Daniel sized up Jesse, taking in his muscular build and clenched jaw that topped off Jesse's skater-tough look: Metal Mulisha T-shirt, calf-length Dickies, buzz-cut hair and a stiff- brimmed baseball hat. A classic suburban thug.
Lowering his voice, Daniel asked if Jesse knew where he might be able to get some weed.
"Yeah, man, I can get you some," Jesse answered in his slow monotone, every word stretched out and articulated with odd precision. Daniel asked for his phone number, and Jesse obliged, his insides roiling with both triumph and anxiety.
On one hand, Jesse could hardly believe his good fortune: His conversation with Daniel would stand as the only meaningful interaction he'd have with another kid all day.
On the other hand, Jesse had no idea where to get marijuana. All Jesse knew in August 2012 was that he had somehow made a friend.
Though it smacks of suburban myth or TV makebelieve, undercover drug stings occur in high schools with surprising frequency, with self-consciously dopey names like "Operation D-Minus" and, naturally, "Operation Jump Street." They're elaborate stings in which adult undercover officers go to great lengths to pass as authentic teens: turning in homework, enduring detention, attending house parties and using current slang, having Googled the terms beforehand to ensure their correctness.
In Tennessee last year, a 22-year-old policewoman emerging from 10 months undercover credited her mom's job as an acting coach as key to her performance as a drug-seeking student, which was convincing enough to have 14 people arrested.
Other operations go even further to establish veracity, like a San Diego-area sting last year that practically elevated policing to performance art, in which three undercover deputies had "parents" who attended back-to-school nights; announcing the first of the sting's 19 arrests, Sheriff Bill Gore boasted this method of snaring teens was "almost too easy."
The practice was first pioneered in 1974 by the LAPD, which soon staged annual undercover busts that most years arrested scores of high schoolers; by the Eighties, it had spread as a favored strategy in the War on Drugs.
Communities loved it: Each bust generated headlines and reassured citizens that police were proactively combating drugs.
Cops loved the stings, too, which not only served as a major morale boost but could also be lucrative.
"Any increase in narcotics arrests is good for police departments. It's all about numbers," says former LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing, who now works with the advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and views these operations with scorn.
"This is not about public safety – the public is no safer, and the school grounds are no safer. The more arrests you have, the more funding you can get through federal grants and overtime."
Yet despite the busts' popularity, their inner workings were shrouded in secrecy, with few details publicly released about their tactics and overall effectiveness. And as time went on, officers and school administrators became alarmed by the results they saw: large numbers of kids arrested for small quantities of drugs – and who, due to "zero tolerance" policies, were usually expelled from school.
No studies appear to exist on the efficacy of high school drug stings, but the data on undercover operations in general isn't encouraging.
A 2007 Department of Justice-funded meta-analysis slammed the practice of police sting operations, finding that they reduce crime for a limited time – three months to a year – if at all. "At best, they are a stopgap measure," and at worst, an expensive waste of police resources, which "may prevent the use of other, more effective problemsolving techniques." The federal study concludes that sting operations reap little more than one consistent benefit: "favorable publicity" for police.
To be sure, public-relations speed bumps have appeared now and again, like when a female LAPD narc allegedly romanced a high school football player, which surfaced via her steamy love letters, or when a developmentally disabled child was swept up in another L.A. bust after selling $9 worth of marijuana to an undercover.
But until now, no department seems to have gone so far as to lay a trap for an autistic kid.
From his seat at a worktable in the art room, Deputy Daniel Zipperstein observed his target and tablemate, Jesse Snodgrass. Like all the other students, Deputy Zipperstein was busily working on the day's class assignment, building a sculpture using cardboard, paper and wire, but Jesse was clearly flummoxed by the project's complexity.
Their ponytailed teacher, James Taylor, paused by the boys' table. "Jesse, OK," Taylor instructed, holding up a piece of cardboard. "Today's task will be to cut out six cardboard squares of this size."
Taylor took pains to pare down each assignment into bite-size chunks for Jesse, but even so, he'd need to keep circling back to remind Jesse to stay on his single small task.
Zipperstein watched Jesse slowly pick up the scissors and get to work.
No one at Chaparral High School knew that transfer student "Daniel Briggs" was in fact a cop in his mid-twenties; as is typical in such an investigation, only a few top district administrators were aware of the operation.
With Daniel's Billabong T-shirts, camo shorts and Vans, "he looked just like an average kid," remembers student Jessica Flores, then 17. Handsome and quick to smile, Daniel was meeting new friends with remarkable ease, though some students remained wary, due to his habit of interrupting strangers' conversations whenever the subject of drugs came up – for which he quickly acquired the nickname "Deputy Dan."
Madalyn Dunn, then 17, was startled while she chatted with friends during shop class, and the new kid leapt right in: "Are you talking about ketamine?"
Dan said, then asked if she'd sell him some, which she declined. Nonetheless, the two wound up walking to fourth period together, bonding over their fondness for pot.
After that, Madalyn says, Daniel wouldn't stop asking her for drugs.
"Oh, come on," he'd pester.
Deputy Dan was just as aggressive with Jesse Snodgrass, pursuing the friendless boy outside the confines of school. Jesse's mom, Catherine, and his dad, Doug, an engineer, had been delighted when Jesse had come home talking about his new friend from art class; they'd been even more surprised when Daniel had started buzzing Jesse's otherwisesilent phone with texts.
Jesse had only ever had one friend before, another special-ed kid who'd recently moved to Alabama, leaving Jesse bereft. And now that Jesse had switched to a new school – a move foisted upon the Snodgrasses when their old house had gone into foreclosure – he had been especially agitated lately. It was only the latest distress in a lifetime of everyday struggles, which Catherine and Doug did their best to help Jesse navigate, fighting the constant battles waged by the parents of children on the autism spectrum: sticking up for him when he was ostracized from playgrounds or asked to leave restaurants as a child; standing up to school districts to secure Jesse equal access to education.
Though the Snodgrasses also had two younger children at home, Jesse's needs had long made him a focal point. They were ready for his life to get easier and were thrilled with the calming prospect of this new friendship.
"Why don't you tell Daniel to come over?" Catherine urged.
"OK." Jesse hunched over his phone as his mom drove him home through the clean streets of Temecula – a planned suburban community northeast of San Diego, population 100,000 – past the big-box strip malls and into their neighborhood of Mediterranean-style homes, where a man-made duck pond sparkled and joggers bounced past.
Jesse's phone vibrated. "He can't do it today, he's grounded," Jesse recited.
Made sense to him. Daniel had already told Jesse that he was always in trouble with his strict mom, a conflict that left him superstressed – which was why Daniel "really needed" Jesse to hook him up with some pot.
"Maybe another time. You guys could order pizza, play video games, just hang out," Catherine said.
Forging friendships was normally so hard for Jesse, who had the cognitive skills of an 11-year-old and was nearly oblivious to the facial expressions, body language, vocal tones and other contextual cues that make up basic social interactions. He was slow to draw inferences or interpret the casual idioms other kids used, like "catch you later," a phrase Jesse had initially found startling, since it turned out to involve no catching whatsoever.
As a toddler, he'd once been terrified for days after his preschool teacher told him, "I'll keep my eye on you."
Jesse had seemed typical enough until age two. Then words started disappearing from his vocabulary, and he spoke in a sporadic, garbled language. His parents grew worried: Their young son made no eye contact and scarcely registered the presence of other people, but drew hundreds of pictures of their vacuum cleaner and would spend hours waving a crayon in front of his face, entranced by the fan of color it etched in the air.
When Jesse was five, a neurologist diagnosed him with Asperger's syndrome, a variant of autism; over the years, Jesse's diagnoses would expand to include Tourette's, bipolar disorder and depression.
An evaluator prepared the Snodgrasses for the possibility that Jesse might never speak again.
Catherine quit her advertising job to plunge Jesse into intensive autism therapies. Amazingly, the interventions got him back on track enough that he was able to attend regular school, taking special-ed classes and mainstream electives, with a counseling team to help him manage.
But Jesse's difficulties were hardly over. He was bullied throughout middle school, mocked as a "retard." He lashed out at his tormentors and, in doing so, developed a discipline record, with suspensions for fighting and many a day penalized in "lunch club," scraping gum from under desks.
Jesse rarely complained about his mistreatment; he was a boy who didn't think to ask for help. Instead, he vented his frustrations with episodes of headbanging, scratching and punching himself, violent and bloody bursts of self-injury.
It took Jesse years of therapy to wean himself from those self-injurious impulses and soothe himself instead with benign motor tics like wringing his hands or snapping his fingers when he felt anxious.
He also found another way to cope.
During his sophomore year of high school, Jesse shaved his head, began lifting weights and developed a new persona his therapist Jason Agnetti came to call his "bro identity."
Dressed in wife-beaters that showed off his biceps, saggy jeans and baseball caps, Jesse would stomp around school, dropping f-bombs and calling other kids "retards." He talked about extreme sports like motocross, off-roading and skateboarding, even though in reality he couldn't ride a bike or even tie his own shoelaces.
In his junior year, Jesse drew a bong on his notebook and called himself "Jesse Smokegrass," despite his inexperience with pot.
By emulating the bad-boy swagger of his own bullies, Jesse was putting on a suit of armor.
Though his parents were a little concerned – and irritated with all his unnecessary posing – they saw it as a phase and, in that regard, not unlike other powerful antagonistic personae Jesse had identified with in the past.
"There was a period of time when he was really obsessed with the Undertaker, the wrestler," says Doug. "And in fourth grade, he was obsessed with Bowser in Super Mario."
To some extent, the bro disguise worked, making Jesse less approachable and even, from a distance, menacing. Anyone who took a closer look, however, could see past the facade.
As he strode the halls of Chaparral, with his robot walk and compulsive fingersnapping, it was clear that something was amiss. "You could see right away that there's something off about him," says Perry Pickett, who at the time was a Chaparral junior.
And as soon as Jesse spoke with his flat affect, slow response time and inability to follow any but the simplest instructions – his impairment was obvious.
And yet Deputy Dan was unrelenting.
As the weeks went by and Jesse continued to stall, Daniel sent Jesse 60 text messages, hounding him to deliver on his promise to get marijuana.
"He was pretty much stalking me," remembers Jesse. "With the begging for the drugs and everything, it was kind of a drag."
Already anxious about his new home and new school, Jesse was conflicted. He knew he didn't really want to get marijuana for Daniel – not that he even knew how – and that the drug requests were ratcheting up his anxiety to an intolerable level. But Jesse also desperately wanted Daniel to like him and didn't want to fail his new friend.
Daniel's oft-stated plight that his home life made him so unhappy that he needed to self-medicate struck a certain chord with Jesse, who also needed pharmaceuticals in order to function.
"I take medication for my own issues,"
Jesse confessed to Daniel, rattling them off: Depakote, Lamictal, Clonazepam.
Burdened by his sense of obligation, frightened and helpless, the pressure was too much for Jesse to handle. One day the turmoil had been so great that after art class, Jesse fled to the boys' bathroom and burned his arm with a lighter.
Three weeks into the school year, Doug and Catherine Snodgrass held a meeting with Jesse's educational-support team, in light of Jesse's self-inflicted burn, to discuss their son's transition to Chaparral.
"They were concerned about him building friendships at the school," attendee Delfina Gomez, Jesse's behavioral- health specialist, would later testify.
Unaware that Jesse was being befriended by a narc, the team assured the Snodgrasses that overseeing Jesse was a priority for them, including finding him "a classroom buddy, peer buddy or peer leader."
Elsewhere in the building that same day,
Daniel pressed $20 into Jesse's hand. "I'll see what I can get you," Jesse told him. I'm gonna meet Daniel before class,"
Jesse told his father five days later while on the drive to school. He bent to read the screen of his phone. "Take me to the Outback Steakhouse." Jesse was jumpy. He'd asked Daniel to come over to his house for the marijuana handoff, but Daniel was insisting on meeting at a strip mall adjacent to Chaparral's ball fields. Daniel's car was already parked in the empty lot when Doug and Jesse arrived at 7:10 a.m. Jesse leapt out of the station wagon.
"Stay here," Jesse instructed his father. Doug, proud of his son's social accomplishment, contented himself with a friendly wave at the young fellow before driving off.
Daniel waved back.
The previous weekend, saddled with Daniel's $20 bill, Jesse had agonized over how to get his hands on some pot. At last, the answer hit him. The medicalÂmarijuana dispensary in downtown Temecula sold marijuana! Jesse congratulated himself on his logic. He and his family often spent leisurely afternoons browsing downtown's pedestrian thoroughfare, where Jesse would branch off for an hour of solo exploration before reconnecting at the Root Beer Company for sodas.
Sure enough, that weekend Jesse wandered toward the dispensary and approached a pale man with bad skin and longish hair – "he kind of had that look of a junkie," Jesse says – who took his $20 and, to Jesse's infinite relief, handed him a clear sandwich baggie with weed inside.
Now, standing with Daniel beside his car and in a hurry to get this nerve-racking errand over with, Jesse thrust the precious stash into his hands.
Daniel glanced at it. It was a pathetic half-gram of dried-up flakes – about five dollars' worth of marijuana, maybe enough to roll a single skinny joint. Still, Daniel seemed satisfied. He threw it in his glove compartment and suggested they get to class.
Later that day, Deputy Zipperstein handed off the baggie to another deputy, who transported it to a police station, where the drugs were field-tested by yet another officer, then ceremoniously weighed, photographed and tagged as evidence:
SUS –SNODGRASS, JESSE $20/.6 GRAM MARIJUANA BUY #1.
The picture was transferred onto CD for posterity.
Read The Full Story Here
Semper Fidelis
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Nemo me impune lacessit
It is Well with My Soul