Nov 2, 2007 12:14 am US/Eastern
Judge Hands Down Sentences For Reid Brothers
NORRISTOWN (CBS3/AP) ―
Brothers Garrett and Britt Reid were sentenced Thursday for separate traffic incidents that occurred on the same January day.
The judge who sentenced the sons of Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid to jail on Thursday likened the coach's home to "a drug emporium" and questioned whether his adult sons should live there, given their drug problems.
"There isn't any structure there that this court can depend upon," Montgomery County Judge Steven O'Neill said before sentencing Reid's son Britt to up to 23 months in jail plus probation.
"I'm saying this is a family in crisis," O'Neill said.
Earlier Thursday, O'Neill sentenced Garrett Reid, a drug addict and dealer who said he got a thrill out of selling drugs in "the 'hood," to up to 23 months in jail for smashing into another motorist's car while high on heroin.
O'Neill noted that searches of the Reid family's home and vehicles found a long list of drugs, guns and ammunition.
He said both boys had been overmedicated throughout much of their lives and that Britt got hooked on painkillers when he suffered a football injury in high school.
"It sounds more or less like a drug emporium there with the drugs all over the house, and you're an addict," O'Neill told Britt Reid.
Police found a shotgun and hollow-point bullets along with cocaine, marijuana and OxyContin in the vehicle Britt Reid was driving during a Jan. 30 road-rage encounter, and later found a handgun at the house that they believe he had brandished at the other driver.
They found vials of heroin and steroids, more than 200 pills and a drug scale in Garrett Reid's car the same day, when he injured another motorist.
While police found only weapons and ammunition -- and not drugs -- at the house, O'Neill apparently based his remarks on Britt Reid's statement that he once mistakenly grabbed a Vicodin tablet instead of health supplements out of a pill drawer at the home.
Andy Reid and his wife, Tammy, were in court but declined to comment. The judge said the parents clearly loved and supported their children and had tried many times over the years to get them help.
"Andy and Tammy are supportive of their son. That has been their position since this all began. He will not comment on it," Garrett Reid's defense attorney, Ross Weiss, said before the judge's comments.
Both Weiss and Britt Reid's attorney, William Winning, declined to comment after the hearing.
Andy and Tammy Reid were quickly escorted by sheriff's deputies and their personal bodyguard through the courthouse basement.
Both sons lived at their parents' home in the suburb of Villanova at the time of their arrests.
Andy Reid took a five-week leave from the Eagles in the offseason to deal with his family's troubles. He has routinely declined to discuss his sons' legal troubles, but said he would not resign from the team because of them.
Britt said everything he did, he did without his parents' knowledge, but O'Neill questioned that.
Both Reids can apply for a special drug court program that would require them to report to authorities regularly, undergo rigorous drug testing and hold down jobs.
Britt Reid, 22, was sentenced to eight to 23 months in jail plus four years of probation on gun and drug charges. He can apply for the special drug program after five months.
Garrett Reid, 24, was sentenced to two to 23 months in the county prison plus one year of probation. He told O'Neill that he would apply to the drug court program.
"I am more than willing to do drug court ... if that's what it's going to take to get clean and sober," Reid said. "If you think that's what's best for me, I want to do it."
Garrett Reid, speaking in court and in a statement to a probation officer, said he made a fast descent into hard drugs and enjoyed being the rich kid who dealt drugs in poor, violent Philadelphia neighborhoods and in the tony Main Line suburbs.
Garrett Reid acknowledged his difficulty with heroin, telling the court he will work to get rid of his addiction to the opiate.
"I don't want to be that kid who was the son of the head coach of the Eagles, who was spoiled and on drugs and OD'd and just faded into oblivion," Reid said in court.
His addiction persists, according to authorities, who found 89 prescription drug pills in Reid's jail cell Thursday morning. They believe he smuggled them in his rectum when he was jailed earlier this week.
"That's consistent with someone as severely drug addicted as he is," said the prosecutor, Senior Deputy Attorney General Marc Costanzo.
Reid's descent in drug use and dealing was steep, according to a probation report read in court.
Reid said he didn't use drugs until he graduated from high school, then started with marijuana and alcohol at age 18. That was followed by prescription pain killers Percocet and OxyContin, and then cocaine and heroin.
By 20, he was in drug rehab.
Reid said he sold drugs to his friends and their parents in the suburbs and in a notoriously tough section of Philadelphia.
"I liked being the rich kid in that area and having my own high status life," Reid told a probation officer in a statement read by the judge. "I could go anywhere in the 'hood. They all knew who I was. I enjoyed it. I liked being a drug dealer."
He said in court Thursday that he has stopped selling drugs.
"I did get a thrill out of it," he said. "That was also part of the whole new world that opened up to me when I smoked that first joint."
Costanzo said authorities were satisfied with the sentence, noting "the drug court is the best part."
The coach's two sons got into separate legal trouble on Jan. 30.
Garrett Reid tested positive for heroin and admitted having used it that day. He ran a red light in Plymouth Township and hit another car. Authorities found syringes with heroin and testosterone in his SUV.
Britt Reid pointed a handgun at another driver following a dispute the same day. He pleaded guilty to a string of charges, including carrying a firearm without a license, a felony.
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