Who killed Jody? It depends who you ask

The last time he saw Jody Mosher alive she was just a silhouette, smoking a cigarette outside the back door of her parents' house.

Under other circumstances, it could have been a tender moment.

They were old friends, after all, and even dated for a while in high school. Then Eddie Hodge joined the Army and went to war, while Jody stayed in their rural farming community of Webberville, population 1,281.

When Eddie returned home after about a decade of service, they settled into a close friendship. Jody texted him that Friday night, and Eddie agreed to drive his mom's car and pick up Jody at her parents' home about a mile north of town.

They drove to Lansing, where they went to a pizza place, hung out in the Meijer parking lot, then watched a football game at their old high school back in Webberville. The Spartans won, 52-14.

When Eddie dropped Jody off at home, they hugged and made plans to meet the next day. She'd go to sleep after the cigarette, he thought, and they could forget about the bad thing that happened that night.

A few hours later, her father found Jody dead on the bedroom floor, wearing pink underwear and mismatched socks.

It didn't take long for police to find the bindle of heroin in Jody's purse. But it took more than three years for the criminal justice system to resolve the biggest questions surrounding her death.

Meanwhile, as the opioid epidemic increasingly ravaged Michigan's communities, prosecutors across the state dusted off a little-used statute and began to aggressively target some of the people closest to drug overdose victims. People like Eddie.

In 2002, Eddie was 20, married and had two young children. What he didn't have was a good job so, a year after 9/11, he enlisted in the Army.

Fresh-faced and 5 feet, 4 inches tall, Eddie didn't shy away from danger. He trained as a combat engineer then went to airborne school before heading to his permanent duty station: Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne Division.

It was March 2003. Since the 101st was already invading Iraq, Eddie joined the division in Mosul, a violent stronghold of Saddam Hussein and his supporters.

In July, soldiers got a tip that Saddam Hussein's two sons were holed up in a nearby villa. For four hours, troops from the 101st and special operations units attacked the compound with machine guns and grenades. After finding the inner sanctum to be impenetrable, they called in helicopters to fire missiles.

That afternoon in Mosul, the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein — the ace of clubs and ace of hearts from the Pentagon's famous "most wanted" deck of cards — were pulled from the rubble. Eddie wasn't involved in the firefight, but he was there to witness it. A year earlier, he had been 6,000 miles away, working as a garbage man in Webberville.

Jody was, at one time, happily married. She adored her two daughters and smiled a lot, said Jeannie Hogan, her mother.

After working as a hairdresser, Jody found a career as a nurse tech at a local hospital.

She was good at her job because she liked helping people and was full of compassion, Jeannie said. "Patients wrote her notes to say how good she was. How kind and caring she was. People loved her."

Ami Lopez Pierson was one of those patients who saw something in Jody. She was at the hospital sometime around 2010, and the two hit it off. They traded phone numbers and grew close after Ami was discharged.

Jody was by then going through a "nasty" divorce, Ami said, and afterward developed a habit of dating men with problems of their own.

In 2011, Jody tried to take the blame after her then-boyfriend crashed his truck into two pedestrians, killing one. Police initially charged her before investigators found out the whole story. The recently paroled boyfriend later pleaded to two felonies and went to prison.

Another relationship ended with a wrist tattoo that said: "Property of Mark."

"Her dating life was, like, crazy," Ami said. "And they were worthless men and guys that were into drugs."

Along the way, Jody got into drugs too. In 2013 Jody was charged with felony drug possession in Wayne County. She pleaded to a misdemeanor and was ordered to spend two years on probation.

Then, in 2014, Jody fell in love — hard.

If it's true that Jody and her coterie of boyfriends were drug users, statistics show they weren't alone. Nationwide, the opioid epidemic dates to the 1990s, but it wasn't until 2009 that overdose deaths began to skyrocket in states such as Ohio and Kentucky.

The epidemic took hold in Michigan around 2012, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that compiles non-partisan data and analysis on health care topics. In one year, the opioid-related overdose death rate in Michigan jumped from 7.1 per 100,000 residents to 9.4, an increase of 32%.

By 2016, the most recent year the data is available, the death rate had jumped 160% since 2012.

Statewide, more than 2,300 people died of drug overdoses that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While officials in recent years have begun to take action — President Donald Trump recently said he wants to execute some drug dealers — the crisis so far shows few signs of abating.

Eddie was still in the Army when his life went awry.

A lot had happened in the decade since he enlisted. He earned a promotion to sergeant, and numerous award citations reference his exemplary service. He moved to a new duty station at Fort Drum, New York. He spent three lengthy deployments in Iraq, and another in Afghanistan.

On one deployment he lost a good friend and two other comrades to an improvised explosive device.

Another time, Eddie rode in a helicopter with casualties of a bombing. One victim, lying on a stretcher and his lips moving in prayer, was in desperate need of a doctor. Eddie watched the man die as they flew across the desert.

Eddie also drove about 10,000 miles within the infamous Triangle of Death during one of the deadliest periods of the Iraq war.

"A lot of people think (post-traumatic stress disorder) comes from seeing combat and all that," he said. "It's not that. It's — a lot of guys, they seek that adrenaline, because... you're always amped up because every second of every day something could and can happen... it will burn you out."

Toward the end of his military career, Eddie said he could feel PTSD "eroding my soul."

In 2012, he went home to Webberville for Christmas and got blackout drunk one night. He doesn't really remember what happened but knows he said some terrible things.

According to a personal protection order filed by his wife, Eddie threatened to kill his family that night. His brothers had to restrain him for nearly an hour.

"All that crap that was inside of me just shattered," Eddie said.

The day after his outburst, Eddie's brother convinced him to check into a psychiatric facility in Ann Arbor. When doctors released him 11 days later, Eddie went back to New York. His wife stayed in Michigan with their children.

Over the next 15 months, Eddie's problems spread like a cancer until they inhabited every corner of his life. He drank heavily and started using drugs. He got divorced and lost the right to see his children. He was demoted a rank, used heroin, tried to kill himself by swallowing a handful of Xanax, tried again by swallowing a larger handful of Xanax, attended a 21-day Army rehab program, and finally, got kicked out of the Army for being an "alcohol rehabilitation failure."

"I didn't care about myself at the time," he said. "I was a father, and I was a soldier. And everything was slipping. So I didn't care. I purposely did all that stuff. I just wanted to really not exist anymore. I knew that heroin would do that for you."

In early 2014, Eddie moved back into his parents' house in Webberville. He worked on and off to feed his addiction. Mostly he just bummed around.

Around the time Eddie returned home, prosecutors and police across the state were increasingly turning to a little-used statute that had been enacted in 2006.

Michigan, alongside 19 other states and the federal government, has a specific law for instances where someone dies from a drug overdose.

In most states, the person who provided the drugs can be punished more than they typically would be for simply dealing them. The law is colloquially known as "drug-induced homicide," although in Michigan the charge is called delivery of a controlled substance causing death, or delivery causing death.

Michigan's law was enacted after a handful of high-profile cases in which prosecutors said there was no mechanism to adequately punish the people who provide drugs to fatal overdose victims.

"The men and women who peddle illegal drugs to our children and our neighbors need to know that they will be held responsible for their behavior," said Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, after signing the bill.

Sen. Phil Pavlov (R-St. Clair), who as a state representative sponsored the bill, told the Southgate News-Herald in 2007 that investigators "now have the tools needed to put the worst people behind bars."

On Aug. 19, 2014, Jody's fiance, John "Johnny" Richards, died of a drug overdose. He and Jody were asleep in her parents' house in Webberville, and she woke up to find him dead, wrapped around her feet.

Jody spent the next couple weeks sleeping on Ami's couch because she couldn't sleep in the bed where Johnny died, she told her friend.

Ami herself was a former drug user, but she'd gotten clean, she said, and wouldn't let Jody use drugs in her house. Ami and her husband watched as Jody went through withdrawal, clawing and scratching herself while sleeping.

Jody's parents said she wanted to get better and sought treatment at a state clinic, but was turned away. She had been attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Ami said she took Jody to a mental health facility after Johnny died, but Jody was discharged a day later.

Ami also said Jody told her how she planned to kill herself. "She was gonna get the same (drug) that killed Johnny," she said. "It's called Blue Smurf, and it's cut with fentanyl, and she said she's gonna shoot up more than what she normally uses, and hopefully it kills her."

There were no indications of fentanyl in Jody's autopsy or toxicology report.

Text messages Jody sent in the hours before her death show she and another friend had been trying to coordinate a drug buy. But that plan apparently would have involved a trip to Detroit, where Jody was still on probation from her drug conviction. She asked Eddie if his dealer, JJ, would sell her heroin.

"Eddie let me lay this out for you I don't go. through JJ om goin jo The D. and probly ODN real talk five minutes I'm getting a. ride"

Eddie at first wasn't sure JJ would accept Jody's Bridge Card, which holds funds for government-subsidized food purchases. But the dealer ultimately agreed to give Jody 50 cents on the dollar for the trade.

"Eddie if this doesny work I'm goin ouy with a bang."

Jody told her parents that she and Eddie were headed to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that night. But the real plan was to drive to Lansing, where they'd trade the Bridge Card for about $150 of heroin.

In 2006, when the drug-induced homicide law first took effect, prosecutors across Michigan filed the charge 13 times.

For the next nine years, use of drug-induced homicide was relatively stagnant, with prosecutors filing the charge about 32 times per year, according to data from the State Court Administrative Office.

Convictions were rare, partly because the cases are difficult to prove.

The drugs found in a victim's bloodstream can't be tied to a particular dealer from forensic testing alone. And frequently, the only witnesses are addicts or dealers themselves. Even when they do cooperate, prosecutors are left trying to prove a case with testimony that jurors may doubt.

But the drug-induced homicide charge carries a significant penalty — up to life in prison — which gives prosecutors a powerful bargaining chip with defendants.

As Eddie tells the story, JJ was hungry so, before selling them drugs, he made Eddie and Jody drive him to DeLuca's Pizza, where he had a carry-out order waiting.

When JJ — later identified by police as Robert Jerry Miles — returned with his food, he slipped into the back seat and took Jody's Bridge Card in exchange for some gray powder heroin folded into a paper lottery slip.

Moments after dropping JJ off back at his house, Eddie noticed Jody's lips had turned blue.

Panicked, he pulled into an empty parking lot.

He shook Jody, then slapped her cheek and threw water in her face. Her skin was losing color. Eddie brought his ear to her face to listen for a breath. Nothing. He started chest compressions.

"After a few minutes of me doing that, she finally took a breath," he said. "Her eyes started opening up, and I continued to try to shake her awake, get her more conscious and start talking."

Eddie's car was the only one in the parking lot and he didn't want to look suspicious, so he drove a couple miles to the nearest Meijer, in Delta Township. When they got there, he shot up some of the heroin — "I was withdrawing and I needed to calm down," he said — then they got out and walked around the parking lot and smoked cigarettes.

After a while, they drove back to Webberville, where they watched the high school football game from the parking lot. Jody's breathing was natural and her color was back. "She looked normal, just very high," Eddie said.

When he dropped her off at home, they hugged and made plans to meet the next day, Eddie said.

"I was almost 100 percent sure that she'd be fine," he said. "She didn't wobble, she didn't drop her purse or stumble around. She got out, walked to the house, and I felt that she was going to be fine."

The next morning, Jody's father, Jeff Hogan, got up for work around 4 a.m. He saw that Jody's bedroom door was closed and the light was turned on, which was odd because she usually left it open in case her daughters wanted to come in while she slept.

Jeff fixed himself a cup of coffee, then went to knock on her door, where he found her on the floor. Jody was officially declared dead at 4:46 a.m. She was 30 years old.

When police called Eddie weeks later to ask about Jody, they said he wasn't in trouble or facing charges. They wanted JJ, the heroin dealer.

Eddie didn't know JJ's real name, but offered to show investigators where the dealer lived.

He rode with a sheriff's deputy to the Lansing house where, he said, he'd watched Jody overdose on JJ's heroin. The deputy didn't know it yet, but the Lansing Police Department had paid a visit to the very same house six days earlier.

In 2010, a Michigan Supreme Court ruling made the state's drug-induced homicide law even more powerful.

The case revolved around a man and his girlfriend who drove from Ann Arbor to Detroit, where she bought crack cocaine and heroin with money he provided.

The woman's friend later died after injecting some of the heroin.

Police charged the girlfriend with drug-induced homicide because she had purchased the heroin and provided it to her friend. But they also charged the man. He appealed before the trial, arguing he didn't know his girlfriend bought the heroin or that she was giving it to the victim.

In a split decision, the Supreme Court ruled the man could indeed face trial for drug-induced homicide. In effect, the court endorsed the prosecutor's "aiding and abetting theory," which means if someone simply assists "either party" in a drug transaction that causes a death, they too, can face trial for drug-induced homicide.

Now, prosecutors had firm legal standing to charge people with drug-induced homicide even when they weren't directly involved in the drug transaction.

For at least part of his life, JJ has been what most people would think of as a "real" drug dealer.

In 2003, when he was 22, JJ admitted conspiring to deal cocaine and spent more than six years in federal prison. During the next few years, he went back to prison or jail at least three times for various crimes or probation violations.

A couple weeks after Jody's death, he was involved in a traffic stop where Lansing police found marijuana plants in the trunk of the car.

After that, undercover officers bought heroin from JJ three times before raiding the little house Eddie would later point out to the sheriff's deputy.

The night of the raid, police broke through the back door. They found JJ hiding in the attic, covered in insulation and next to a hastily hidden handgun he wasn't supposed to have. Police also found about 8 pounds of processed marijuana and a small amount of heroin in the kitchen cupboard, on the floor in the living room and in JJ's wallet. But court records show the real prize was outside.

During the raid, two of JJ's friends showed up looking for JJ. Inside their Cadillac, police found a canister of tire sealant with a secret compartment containing 36 grams of powder fentanyl.

In 2014, fentanyl powder was relatively uncommon. At a court hearing after the raid, Assistant U.S. Attorney Raymond Beckering III said he was "flabbergasted" that police had found so much of the synthetic painkiller, which experts say can be 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin.

"The only source of that can be a theft from a manufacturer or, even more scary, a Mexican supply of fentanyl," he said. "And the last time there was a Mexican supply of fentanyl in the Midwest, we had 50 dead people in Chicago.

"Your honor," the prosecutor continued, "I cannot think of a more serious case here... I don't know that there's a more dangerous person in Lansing, period."

JJ would ultimately be sentenced to another seven years in federal prison after admitting to weapon and drug charges.

Investigators in Lansing, meanwhile, were working to charge JJ in connection with Jody's death. But someone else caught their attention first.

Although opioid overdose deaths began to spike in 2012, it wasn't until 2016 that prosecutors across Michigan began charging significantly more people with drug-induced homicide.

From 2015 to 2016, the total skyrocketed from 35 to 98. In 2017, it jumped again, with prosecutors filing the charge 117 times — a 234% increase in only two years.

And while it's true that many cases involve charges against people with a history of drug dealing, a State Journal analysis of more than 150 drug-induced homicide cases in Michigan found that many defendants are seemingly not predatory dealers — "the worst people," as Pavlov described them — but rather folks who appear to have been just as entangled in drug abuse as the victims who died.

Using information pulled from media reports dating as far back as 2007, the analysis found at least 60 of the 153 cases involved defendants who likely wouldn't be considered a drug dealer by traditional definitions.

In 35 of those cases, the defendant was a friend or acquaintance of the victim; many were themselves drug users or addicts.

In another 27 cases, the defendant was a significant other or family member of the victim. Husbands, nephews, children, aunts and even a grandmother have been charged with drug-induced homicide.

One year to the day after Jody's death, Eddie had another bad blackout.

He and a friend went to a Holt bar to meet some people, and somehow Eddie ended up alone and cold on the rural outskirts of Lansing.

The next morning, Eddie was found asleep in the foyer of a home whose residents happened to be away on vacation. Outside, there was damage to all four doors of a Mercedes sitting in the driveway, which is where police also found a lighter with Eddie's name on it. A trash bin was tipped over. Eddie's ball cap was in the backyard, on a chicken coop that had also been damaged.

Inside, just past a broken exterior window, Eddie lay asleep in the fetal position, with a polo shirt pulled partially over his head. He appeared to have removed his own shirt and tried to switch it out with one he found in the kitchen, police wrote in their report.

Eddie remembered being at the bar, he told police, but not much after that. When they arrested him, police found there was already a warrant out for Eddie on a charge filed weeks earlier: delivery of a controlled substance causing death.

Eddie, an addict who said he neither provided nor paid for the drugs that killed Jody, was being charged with homicide.

He had two options: Take the case to trial, where prosecutors could use Eddie's own words against him and argue that he was guilty under the aiding-and-abetting theory endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Or he could make a deal. If he agreed to testify against JJ, prosecutors would let him plead to involuntary manslaughter, which is still considered homicide but carries a reduced sentence. They'd also drop charges for the break-in as long as he agreed to pay restitution for the damaged Mercedes.

Unable to pay his $200,000 bond, he sat in jail, mulling his decision.

As John Shea sees it, charging people like Eddie with drug-induced homicide is unjust.

Shea, a prominent Ann Arbor-based criminal defense attorney who co-chairs the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan's rules and law committee, said he doesn't oppose enhanced penalties for dealers whose drugs kill someone. But he said the current law is written too broadly.

"Too often you're getting the people who aren't drug dealers caught in the net," he said. "These social sharing circumstances ... I don't believe any legislator would say they intended it to cover them. That's how the Supreme Court has interpreted the language, and they interpreted it that way because that's how the language is written."

Shea said the state's drug-induced homicide statute was, like many other laws, inspired by "extreme" cases that don't represent most real-world scenarios.

"We tend to be knee-jerk," he said. "We see a horrific example of a case and we decide that we're gonna let this be a standard that we're gonna bear to fix. And you create more problems than you solve."

In the months before getting arrested, Eddie had managed to scratch his way back into a life that resembled normalcy. He still used drugs periodically, but found regular work with a property management company.

Cindy Allen, who runs a local property preservation business, ran into Eddie on various job sites. They were more or less acquaintances, but one night she went out with a group of friends to celebrate her birthday, and she and Eddie hit it off.

Even after Eddie's arrest, Cindy, a former GM assembly plant worker, found she had a soft spot for him.

During the three months he was in jail, they spoke on the phone almost daily.

"A lot of people don't understand it," she said. "I already knew him, but you really got to ... learn a lot about someone, rather than if you're just hanging out and going out to dinner."

When Eddie got his bond reduced and posted bail about three months after his arrest, Cindy gave him a job and a home. Now they're engaged.

"At times I worry (about Eddie) because I know it's such a struggle," she said. "For years, he just didn't care about anything... he couldn't care less if he got hit by a car walking across the street, because he felt like he didn't deserve to have a good life.

"He's realizing that he's not — that he's worth something. That he deserves to have a good life and wants to work for it."

Eddie took the deal prosecutors offered. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to one year in jail.

Two days later, JJ was charged with drug-induced homicide in connection with Jody's death.

To prosecutors, charging people like JJ is the ultimate goal of any drug-induced homicide investigation.

"The first order is to get as high up the food chain as you can go," said D.J. Hilson, the Muskegon County prosecutor who is also president-elect of the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan. "It's not being satisfied with the user or the friend, but to get to that next level, the dealer."

At the same time, Hilson pointed out that prosecutors and law enforcement must work with what information is available when making charging decisions in a drug overdose death.

"Let's say, for example, the friend (of an overdose victim) has decided not to be cooperative," he said. "Well, OK, there is somebody still dead, and there needs to be somebody held accountable to that. So if as far as we can go is 'you,' then I guess you're taking responsibility for what happened to your friend.

"And whether that's fair or unfair, it's hard to say. At the end of the day, we make charging decisions. Courts make sentencing decisions. And whether or not that evens out in the final sentence or not, I guess, is kind of for judges to work through."

As his trial approached, JJ was defiant.

He, too, had been offered a deal: Plead guilty to the drug-induced homicide charge, and JJ wouldn't spend any additional time behind bars beyond his current federal sentence.

Still maintaining his innocence, JJ rejected the offer. Earlier this month, his trial began.

Prosecutors presented jurors with circumstantial evidence from cell phone records that seemed to corroborate Eddie's version of events. But their case rested largely on his testimony. Would jurors believe him?

As he sat outside the courtroom waiting to testify in JJ's trial, Eddie reflected on his decision to take the plea deal.

In the months since his release from jail, Eddie largely stayed clean, he said. But a relapse late last year meant a probation violation and another 90 days in an alternative treatment program that offers inmates counseling and classes.

On one hand, Eddie said, he has a homicide conviction that will follow him forever. On the other, if he had gone to trial and ended up with a long prison sentence, his life would be far worse — and without Cindy.

After his release, Eddie said, he hopes to become a pipefitter. It's honest work, the pay is good, and he can help Cindy rehab buildings.

"Right now this is just reset mode," he said. "I have a really good view of where I'm going and I'm in a good head space. It's never too late to restart your life."

When Eddie took the stand to testify, JJ's attorney, Mark Kamar, hammered the fact that Eddie didn't seek medical help for Jody after she overdosed.

Kamar pointed out inconsistencies in some of Eddie's statements. Whereas earlier he'd told investigators he took the rest of the heroin from Jody before dropping her off, this time Eddie testified he couldn't remember for sure whether he did or not.

Police searching Jody's purse after her death found heroin wrapped in a lottery ticket. If Eddie did take the rest of the heroin, she must have had some other source, the attorney noted.

"Nobody puts Ms. Mosher in that vehicle besides Mr. Hodge," Kamar told jurors. "Who is he protecting? Himself?"

After deliberating for hours, the jury returned their verdict: JJ was guilty of delivering heroin, they decided, but not guilty of drug-induced homicide.

When he's sentenced in April, JJ could face decades in prison thanks to his previous convictions. But in the eyes of the criminal justice system, Eddie is the sole person responsible for Jody's death.

Small, white and set back from the road, Jeff and Jeannie Hogan's home is the sort of place grandchildren would love to visit.

Farm fields are slathered in every direction but you wouldn't know it standing in their yard because there are so many trees. Big trees with burls, and branches that swoop down across the driveway. Back at the house, there's a playset and a Power Wheels car and four windchimes on the porch. Technically it's the back porch, but the door there is called the front door because it's the one everybody uses.

Jeff and Jeannie don't have much time to be grandparents because they're now guardians to Jody's 9- and 11-year-old daughters.

"We were an average middle-class family," Jeff said, thinking back to 2014. "She tried desperately to get help. But (she) assured us not to worry... A week after she died, a place called and said they could possibly help her. I was like, 'Too late, she died.'"

He compares drug dealers to cancer: Users become addicts, and addicts become dealers to feed their addiction. "They just multiply and attack," he said.

Jeannie said she knows JJ is, in some ways, a victim himself. But she hopes he gets a long prison sentence to "really ponder what happened."

As for Eddie, she said he's a "good guy" who was in many ways a victim of addiction just as much as her daughter.

More than anything, Jeannie said people need more help than Jody got because once they try a drug like heroin, there's almost no turning back. And when Jody needed help more than ever, the people she turned to offered the wrong kind of help, Jeannie said.

"She had good friends that supported her and tried to help her, and she had ones that were stuck in the same cycle and kept sucking her in," she said. "Don't get help from somebody doing drugs because they can't even help themselves. I look back and I wish that I could have noticed that."

Contact Christopher Haxel at 517-377-1261 or chaxel@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @ChrisHaxel.