this is evil(so says Joe)

Subject: this is evil(so says Joe)


Remember Joe, if there is Evil, it was Created by God, who knows the
beginning and the end and who created All.

But that begs the issue. We have been sold a load of crap when it comes to
our War on Drugs. Just like our War on Terror, we are losing the very
people we proclaim to be "protecting".

Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "joe harcz Comcast" <joeharcz@comcast.net>
To: "blind democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 11:44 AM
Subject: this is evil


The Entrapment of Jesse Snodgrass . How did an autistic teen loner get
targeted by an undercover cop? By Sabrina Rubin Erdely . 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 make-believe, undercover drug stings occur

in high schools with surprising frequency, with self-consciously dopey names
like "Operation DMinus" 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-seekingstudent, 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
proactivelycombating 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-fundedmeta-

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
problem-solving

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 Los Angeles 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 Tshirts,
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 otherwise-silent 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 selfinjury. 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, offroading 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 finger-snapping, 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, includingfinding 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
medical-marijuana 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 nerverackingerrand 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. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department
was becoming expert at this sort of thing. Over the previous two years, it

had staged two stings in other school districts, arresting 14 students at
Palm Desert High School in 2010, and 24 students from Moreno Valley and
Wildomar

high schools in 2011; in both cases, undercovers had bought marijuana,
Ecstasy and cocaine. So when in July 2012 the sheriff's department had
approached

the Temecula Valley Unified School District to report a suspicion of drug
sales in two high schools, Superintendent Timothy Ritter had granted
permission

for Operation Glasshouse. (All TVUSD personnel declined comment, citing
litigation.) His compliance seemed natural in conservative Temecula, a
former tiny

ranching town whose population had exploded over the past 20 years as people
seeking affordable homes moved inland - many of them military families from

Camp Pendleton - and where police maintained an aggressive presence, intent
on keeping it an oasis of order. Two young, attractive deputies were chosen

for Operation Glasshouse. Deputy Yesenia Hernandez was enrolled in Temecula
Valley High School. Petite and outgoing, she was an instant hit, especially

with the boys, who misread her attentions. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein was
dispatched to Chaparral, where, as the new kid constantly talking about
drugs,

he had to overcome some initial skepticism. "Ask him for his badge number!
some kids playfully called out, when at lunch time he asked to sit with a
bunch

of selfdescribed "happy stoners. Daniel laughed along, joking back in a
goofy voice, "Yeah, OK, you're all under arrest. But Zipperstein disarmed
kids

with his frank approach, explaining, "I'm new, I don't have any friends here
yet. He was quick to open up about his pretend personal life, telling kids

he'd had to move from his dad's in Redlands to live with his irritating
mother. "It's so hard to deal with my mom and shit," he said. "She's always
bitching.

To escape her tyranny, all he wanted to do was lock himself in his room and
get high. Remembers student Perry Pickett, "I dunno, I felt bad for the kid.

Girls thought it charming when Daniel said he still traveled to Redlands
each weekend to visit his girlfriend - whose favorite activity,
incidentally,

was getting high together. "We were like, 'OK, that's romantic, I guess,'"
says Jessica Flores, who sold him a gram or so of marijuana a half-dozen
times.

But although Daniel was in a relationship, that didn't stop him from
admiring other girls, like when, during one lunch period with a view into
the dance

room, Daniel exhorted about a 15-year-old in spandex, "Dang, look at the ass
on that one! Before long, kids accepted Daniel as one of their own, enough

that his unusual persistence in ferreting out drugs stopped raising red
flags, as well as his notably indiscriminate appetite. "If you mentioned
weed,

he wanted weed," says Madalyn, who sold him some of her marijuana, LSD and
molly. "If I brought up acid, that's what he wanted. He said he wanted to
get

coke. He had no limitation. Students also overlooked how odd it was for a
high schooler to have so much cash, giving it out with such abandon. Once,
when

he handed Perry $15, asking for weed, and Perry came back empty-handed,
Daniel told him to keep the money. "I felt like I owed him something," says
Perry,

who, due to his learning difficulties, was a special-needs student with an
individualized learning plan. He had felt especially bad because Daniel had

been so open and vulnerable about his lousy family situation. So when Perry
heard that a kid in his third-period class was selling Vicodin swiped from

his parents' medicine cabinet, he offered to introduce Daniel.Strangely
enough, he says, Daniel demurred, but instead handed Perry $14, instructed
him

to buy $10 worth of pills on his behalf - thus creating the transaction
necessary for a bust - and to keep the change. "I was like, 'All right, four
bucks!

That's a couple chicken sandwiches right there!' says Perry. Meanwhile,
Perry's 16-year-old friend Sebastian Eppinger, seeing how careless Daniel
was with

his money, thought he recognized an opportunity and agreed to act as a
middleman. "I ripped him off superbad," says Sebastian. "I sold him 20
bucks' worth

of weed for $80. Any skepticism about Daniel being a narc evaporated after
Perry delivered him his Vicodin. Grinning and thanking him profusely, Daniel

informed Perry and Sebastian he didn't swallow Vicodin, he smoked it. The
boys were dubious, so Daniel described how he'd rub off the pill's coating,
grind

it to powder, then freebase it off tinfoil. To demonstrate, Daniel popped
the pill into his mouth and sucked it, then spat it out and rubbed it on his

shirt, explaining that it was now ready for crushing and smoking. "I heard
you can do the same thing with heroin," Daniel said, dropping a hint about
his

next drug target. The boys didn't pick up on the bait; they were agog,
having learned a new drug-taking technique. As autumn drew to a close,
Daniel had

little contact with Jesse Snodgrass anymore. He'd managed to give Jesse
another $20, two weeks after the first sale - and, in return, got an even
skimpier

amount of marijuana than the first time, under a half-gram. But then Daniel
had asked Jesse to sell him some Clonazepam, Jesse's anxiety medication.
Jesse

was adamant in his refusal: That was his medicine - he needed it. When Jesse
wouldn't budge, Daniel completely lost interest in their friendship. The
rejection

stung. Jesse's parents would inquire about Daniel, and he'd shrug it off. He
tried to forget about it and focus on the things that mattered, like passing

algebra. Against all odds, Jesse was inching his way toward a high school
diploma. On the morning of December 11th, the door to Jesse's art classroom
burst

open, and five armed police officers in bulletproof vests rushed in, calling
his name. Jesse was handcuffed in front of his classmates. He thought maybe

he was asleep and dreaming. "I was confused," he remembers. "I didn't know
what was going on," and he didn't connect the events back to Daniel. Neither

did Madalyn or Jessica, who also were arrested in their classrooms; the
three of them, along with two other boys, were paraded in handcuffs out of
Chaparral

and into a police van. At the same time, in a classroom at nearby Rancho
Vista continuation high school, Perry - who'd transferred to get better
one-on-one

special-needs attention - was being shackled; and Sebastian, sick at home,
awoke to find his bedroom filled with cops. Fifteen students from Temecula
Valley

High School were also rounded up, bringing the number of students arrested
in Operation Glasshouse to an impressive 22. The scale of the takedown
operation

was enormous, from the swarming officers in tactical gear to the police
helicopter hovering overhead. Authorities announced they had seized
marijuana,

Ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, meth and prescription drugs. Though it
declined to divulge the quantities, the sheriff's office insisted that the
amounts

collected were beside the point: "The program is not designed to recover
large amounts of drugs," it said in a statement to RS. "The program is
designed

to quell hand-to-hand narcotics transactions on campus. That evening, the
big drug bust would be the talk of Southern California, with newscasts
leading

with the story - prominently featuring a dramatic photograph of a tall boy
dressed in a gray hoodie and black Dickies, his hands cuffed behind his
back,

f lanked by armed officers. Jesse Snodgrass had just become Operation
Glasshouse's unlikely poster child. Why do you think you're here? "I don't
know,"

Jesse answered. "I was just called up and that's why I'm wondering. In a
plain-walled interrogation room at the Perris police station, near Temecula,
Jesse

sat stiffly in a chair, hands clenched. Across the table, hunched over a
clipboard, sat a lean man with stringy blond hair, a plaid shirt and a
police

badge hanging from his neck. Jesse was anxious to clear up this whole
misunderstanding and go home. For more than an hour, he'd been waiting in a
common

area in tense silence with 21 other kids, the vast majority of them Mexican-
American boys, desperately studying their downcast faces for clues. None had

been told the reason for their arrests and were forbidden to talk. Any time
they'd made a sound, officers barked, "You better shut your mouth. Jesse had

watched as one by one they'd been called into this little room, although one
key nuance had eluded him: Each had emerged looking shocked and terrified;

one girl had a fullblown panic attack. "All right," said the deputy from the
Riverside County Sheriff's Special Investigations Bureau, looking up from

his clipboard. "Have you ever sold drugs? "No. Jesse was resolute. "You
sure? "Yeah, I'm sure," answered Jesse. He'd been as compliant as possible
with

his answers, having waived his Miranda rights - though he hadn't entirely
understood what he was agreeing to, he had said "yes" anyway to demonstrate
his

cooperation - but he could tell he was bombing this quiz. In his
nervousness, Jesse already had been unable to recall his mom's phone number
and his home

address. He was, however, forthcoming when the officer asked if he'd ever
used drugs, truthfully admitting that he'd once smoked pot, but that he just

wasn't into it. "Have you ever sold drugs at Chaparral High School? the
deputy asked. "Nope. "You never sold drugs to any students there? "No, sir,"
Jesse

said respectfully. "Mm-kay. Then, in a theatrical flourish that would be
performed 22 times that day, the deputy crossed the interrogation room to
open

the door. "Do you know who this is? he asked, as a uniformed police officer
with short, neat hair walked in. Jesse did a double take. "Daniel? he asked

the officer uncertainly. Deputy Daniel Zipperstein didn't answer but simply
stood with his feet planted apart and his hands clasped in front of him,
staring

straight ahead. Jesse marveled at how different his friend appeared, nearly
unrecognizable in these clothes and in this pose, so proud and tall. It was

as though Daniel had grown up overnight, looking so markedly different that
when he made his dramatic entrance into Perry's interrogation, Perry
exclaimed,

"Do you have a younger brother at Chaparral? making the officers guffaw. And
yet even with Daniel standing over him like a statue and the interrogator

looking amused from across the table, Jesse's mind struggled to knit the
bits of information into a cohesive narrative. "Am I getting in any trouble?
Jesse

asked. "Well, what do you think? answered the deputy, snickering. With that,
the criminal-justice system intractably moved Jesse Snodgrass forward - even

though, before leaving the interrogation room, the deputy had to walk the
still-uncomprehending Jesse through the logic at play behind his crime: that

Jesse had not merely given Daniel drugs; because Daniel had paid him, Jesse
had, in fact, sold drugs. So confused was Jesse that upon leaving the
station,

he found himself loaded into a van with a half-dozen kids who'd admitted to
having done drugs within the past 24 hours, en route to the hospital to have

their vitals monitored. "Are you mentally retarded? a cop at the hospital
cautiously asked after Jesse droned down his list of psychiatric meds. When
Jesse

answered, "I have Asperger's," the officer groaned. Nonetheless, protocol
being protocol, Jesse was shuttled onward to Southwest Juvenile Hall, where
he

was placed in a holding cell to await booking - and where, by late
afternoon, his distraught mother was on the phone with an officer, trying to
reach her

son. "My son is self-injurious," Catherine pleaded. "If he hangs himself on
your watch, it is your fault. Incredibly, Jesse's parents were never
notified

of their son's arrest, but learned of it when he didn't surface after
school; a cascade of calls had finally put Doug in touch with the school
principal,

who informed him in a businesslike way that Jesse had been arrested hours
earlier. Both parents had been shocked, but like Jesse himself, they assumed

this was some sort of fixable error. And yet to their horror, they'd come to
discover that their son - a boy who scarcely left home - would now be
detained

for at least the next two days. "You know, Mama, the kids here love it," a
female officer told Catherine when she called the juvenile hall that first
evening

to make arrangements to drop off Jesse's meds. "They get three square meals
and a bed. They love it here, and they keep coming back. The implication
stung

Catherine: that the kids locked inside - including her son - were already
criminals, headed for a life of incarceration. That was also the message of
the

district attorney's office in the courthouse two days later. According to
Doug and Catherine, as all of the families somberly gathered to see their
children

for the first time since the arrest, Senior Deputy District Attorney Blaine
Hopp strode into the center of the crowd. "This should be a wake-up call to

all of you. Your children are drug dealers," he announced. "But this is an
opportunity to save them," he added, inviting parents to speak with him
before

the proceedings began. To the Snodgrasses' surprise, many did. That didn't
stop Hopp from arguing to the judge that each child posed a danger to the
community

and should therefore stay in custody longer - a frightening prospect to
parents and kids alike. When Jesse's turn came, he was charged with two
felonies,

one for each marijuana sale. Hopp argued that Jesse should remain locked up
for an additional month, until his next court date - even though the
probation

department, having reviewed his history, had recommended his release. From
their seats, the Snodgrasses listened aghast as Hopp lambasted their son as

a menace to society, and got their first glimpse of Jesse in his
prison-issued orange jumpsuit. He didn't return their gaze. Jesse had
regressed after

spending three days and two nights in the juvenile prison system. And while
incarcerated, he'd struggled to process Daniel's betrayal. "I thought we
were

really good friends," he kept mumbling to his fellow inmates, who had to
explain the situation to him. When Jesse had finally been escorted into
court,

his expression was blank. Although desperate to see his parents, his eyes
skipped right over them without recognition, a behavior they hadn't seen
since

his childhood. When the judge announced his immediate release, Jesse showed
no sign that he had heard or understood. At home, Jesse unraveled. For six

weeks, he could barely summon language to speak and simply sat motionless,
sometimes waving a hand in front of his face, much like when he was three
years

old. "I want to die," he managed to tell his parents at Christmastime, his
face buried in his pil low. There were emergency therapy sessions and
adjustments

to his medication. His parents stayed up all night to keep watch. And in the
midst of everything, the Snodgrasses received a letter from the Temecula
Valley

Unified School District, notifying them that in light of the allegations
against Jesse and that he had sold drugs near campus, it was suspending him,
and

moving forward with his expulsion. Few families in the snodgrasses'
situation fight back. Even fewer speak out. "There's a lot of shame for the
family,

for your kid to be involved with a drug case," says Lynne Lyman, California
state director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "The stigma is tremendous. But

Catherine and Doug Snodgrass were atypical parents. They'd been fighting
with school districts Jesse's entire life; in their younger days, they'd
been

union organizers. And the Snodgrasses were convinced they had no reason to
hide. "We have nothing to be ashamed of, Jesse has nothing to be ashamed
of,"

says Doug. "The people who do this, they're the ones who should be ashamed.
The criminal judge seemed inclined to agree, noting that Jesse's autism
amounted

to "unusual and exceptional circumstances. Jesse was sentenced to "informal
probation," wherein if he kept out of trouble for six months and did 20
hours

of community service, his record would be wiped clean. The Snodgrasses
accepted the quickie plea deal rather than put Jesse through the stress of a
trial

- and because they were already waging a battle on a second front. In an
effort to stop the Temecula Valley Unified School District from expelling
Jesse,

the Snodgrasses appealed to the state's Office of Administrative Hearings.
During a six-day hearing in February 2013, the school district dug in its
heels

on its right to expel Jesse for his crime, presenting a parade of
witnesses - including members of Jesse's trusted school support team - to
insist that

despite Jesse's autism, the boy knew right from wrong, and therefore should
have been able to resist the undercover cop's entreaties. The district's
director

of Child Welfare and Attendance, Michael Hubbard, who was one of only three
district administrators with foreknowledge of the sting, further testified

that his faith in Operation Glasshouse was so complete that he'd felt fine
about Jesse's arrest. "I didn't believe it was coercion or entrapment for
any

of the kids," Hubbard testified. In March last year, Judge Marian Tully's
19-page ruling excoriated the school district for setting Jesse up to fail.
"The

district placed Student in an extremely difficult social-problem scenario
that would have been difficult even for typical high school students," she
wrote,

much less a special-needs kid. Chastising the district for "leaving Student
to fend for himself, anxious and alone, against an undercover police
officer,"

she ordered that Jesse be returned to school immediately. Yet Jesse's
victories did little to ease his frayed mental state as he headed back to
Chaparral

High School. He shook with anxiety in the car on the drive there and hadn't
yet overcome his new habit of crumpling to the floor anytime they passed a

police car. During the three-month suspension since his arrest, Jesse had
been overwhelmed by paranoia so great that once when their doorbell rang, he

tackled his mother to the floor, begging, "Don't answer! Plagued by panic
attacks and nightmares - the back of his left hand was gouged by a deep
groove

where he'd anxiously scratched himself raw - Jesse had been diagnosed with
PTSD. He was frightened to be back at Chaparral, where the other kids stared

and counselors who'd testified against him now smiled at him, and where, to
his parents' disbelief, the school district had filed an appeal of the
administrative

ruling - it was still fighting to expel him. Despite all that, Jesse was
dimly aware that he had it pretty good compared to his fellow arrestees: Of
the

22 kids arrested, he's apparently the only one still getting a traditional
education. "Every one of us got expelled," says Perry, who now attends a
reform

school, along with most of the others caught in the sting. Others took their
expulsion as a cue to drop out, like Madalyn, who now lives in Los Angeles,

working as a receptionist for an HVAC company. She was only three classes
shy of a high school diploma. "So close," she says wistfully. But while less

than thrilled about their day-today lives, they're grateful to have escaped
worse fates, since Perry, Sebastian, Jessica and Madalyn, like many of the

kids, pleaded guilty in exchange for no further jail time; their juvenile
criminal records will be sealed. That puts them in a luckier boat than the
two

students who happened to have been 18 at the time of their crimes and were
treated as adults: One, charged with selling marijuana and meth, spent 30
days

in a men's jail, at which point he threw himself upon the mercy of the court
and was sentenced to residential rehab; the second boy, charged with three

marijuana sales, was sentenced to two years in county jail. Stings like
these can have a long-term impact on kids, sometimes in devastating ways.
Research

shows that juvenile arrests predict brushes with the law as adults. "These
kinds of practices push students out of school and toward the
criminal-justice

system," says state director Lyman, noting that minority, special-needs and
poor children are particularly at risk. "It's known as the school-to-prison

pipeline. Persuaded by the high potential for bad outcomes for kids, and by
the lack of evidence of good results for communities, the National
Association

of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials has concluded that undercover
high school operations are usually a poor strategy. "We're more interested

in getting kids help that need it, rather than targeting kids to be locked
up," says former police chief Larry Johnson, president-elect of NASSLEO.
Even

the birthplace of these stings, Los Angeles, has backed off the tactic;
after the school district began openly questioning its efficacy in 2004, the
LAPD

abruptly shut down its 30-year-old undercover School Buy program.
Nevertheless, Riverside County is undeterred. This past December - one year
after the

raid that arrested Jesse Snodgrass - the sheriff 's department announced yet
another successful undercover operation: a semester-long sting that nabbed

25 high school students in the nearby cities of Perris and Meniffee, most
for small amounts of marijuana. Among the arrestees was reportedly a
15-year-old

special-ed student who reads at a thirdgrade level, arrested for selling a
single Vicodin pill for $3, which he used to buy snacks. Perris
Superintendent

Jonathan Greenberg has called the operation "an unqualified success. The
Snodgrasses don't want their experience to be in vain and are now suing the
Temecula

Valley Unified School District, accusing it of negligence for allowing their
son to be targeted despite his disabilities. "We think that we can make
these

operations stop," says Doug. "We want to use this to send a message to
administrators everywhere. When they're approached by police departments
about having

an undercover operation at their school, they'll remember a district got
sued. Reflecting on his experience as the target of an undercover drug
sting,

Jesse still doesn't know quite what to make of it. "They were actually out
to get us," Jesse says, sounding mystified as he swigs a protein shake;
because

of his PTSD, he still sometimes finds himself unable to eat and wants to
regain some of the weight he's lost. He managed to graduate this past
December

and has started a job in construction. In the meantime, he has gleaned a few
important lessons from the ordeal: "To not trust everyone you see," he says

thoughtfully. Through his friend's harsh betrayal, he has come to understand
that people aren't always what they appear to be, a cruel but necessary
lesson

that all children must learn sometime. He has realized that even adults are
capable of acting with terrible unkindness and duplicity. Jesse's insights

have made him wary of meeting new people, fearful of hidden motives, which,
as he now knows, his disabilities make him powerless to detect. And Jesse
learned

one more valuable lesson. "I mean, the Riverside County Sheriff's
Department, they taught me how to buy pot," he says, and breaks into a grin.
THE BUST

Snodgrass made the nightly news when he was arrested in Operation
Glasshouse. Contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote "About a Girl" in
RS 1195.

TARGETED "The people who did this should be ashamed," says Jesse's dad, Doug
(with Jesse and mom Catherine). STUNG At the police station, Jesse (left)

was shocked to learn his only friend, Daniel (above left), was a cop..







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