Teen text message: “Can we just get doped up and lay around all day”
Text messages reveal teen drug culture
by Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune
Wednesday March 12, 2008, 2:03 PM
Offering a rare peek behind the curtain of the city’s teenage drug culture, an FBI affidavit filed in court Tuesday reveals a series of text messages sent in the hours leading up to the heroin-related death of a Lusher Charter School student, and the panic that followed.
Most chillingly, the messages and other information detailed in the document suggest that Madeleine Prevost’s boyfriend, Henry Deeb Gabriel III, was making efforts to cover up what had happened even before the 16-year-old was pronounced dead on Jan. 6. He was arrested Tuesday.
In a closed detention hearing Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Louis Moore ordered that Gabriel be imprisoned based on the affidavit and testimony.
Gabriel, 23, who worked at Lusher until December, is the fourth person to be arrested or charged in connection with the death of Prevost, a junior at Lusher whose mother is a social worker at the school.
The affidavit supporting his arrest, filed by FBI Special Agent James Hurley, says that Gabriel and Prevost had “an intimate emotional relationship,” and that they were together the afternoon and evening of Jan. 5, when she snorted the drugs that eventually killed her.
The affidavit says Gabriel got the drugs — heroin and cocaine — through a Lusher student, Diego Perez, 18, who in turn purchased them from David Battenberg, 27. Battenberg and Perez, like Gabriel, have been arrested on the basis of criminal complaints. None has been indicted.
A fourth person, Clinton “South” Rodriguez, has been indicted on a related charge of heroin possession. Rodriguez allegedly was the source of the drugs Battenberg sold to Gabriel and were eventually ingested by Prevost on the fatal night.
The FBI affidavit, bolstered by interviews with Gabriel and Perez as well as a series of text messages among the various parties, paints that night in vivid detail.
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