Framed
She was the PTA mom everyone knew. Who would want to harm her?
By Christopher Goffard
The cop wanted her car keys. Kelli Peters handed them over. She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys.
They were outside Plaza Vista School in Irvine, where she had watched her daughter go from kindergarten to fifth grade, where any minute now the girl would be getting out of class to look for her. Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program.
Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. Watched as the cop emerged from her car holding a Ziploc bag of marijuana, 17 grams worth, plus a ceramic pot pipe, plus two smaller EZY Dose Pill Pouch baggies, one with 11 Percocet pills, another with 29 Vicodin. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name.
Her legs buckled and she was on her knees, shaking violently and sobbing and insisting the drugs were not hers.
The cop, a 22-year veteran, had found drugs on many people, in many settings. When caught, they always lied.
Peters had been doing what she always did on a Wednesday afternoon, trying to stay on top of a hundred small emergencies.
She was 49, with short blond hair and a slightly bohemian air. As the volunteer director of the Afterschool Classroom Enrichment program at Plaza Vista, she was a constant presence on campus, whirling down the halls in flip-flops and bright sundresses, a peace-sign pendant hanging from her neck.
If she had time between tasks, she might slip into the cartooning class to watch her 10-year-old daughter, Sydnie, as she drew. Her daughter had been her excuse to quit a high-pressure job in the mortgage industry peddling loans, which she had come to associate with the burn of acid reflux.
No matter how frenetic the pace became at school, the worst day was better than that, and often afternoons ended with a rush of kids throwing their arms around her. At 5 feet tall, she watched many of them outgrow her.
Peters had spent her childhood in horse country at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. She tossed pizzas, turned a wrench in a skate shop, flew to Hawaii on impulse and stayed for two years. She mixed mai tais at a Newport Beach rib joint. She waited tables at a rock-n-roll-themed pasta house. A married lawyer — one of the regulars — grew infatuated with her and showed up at her house one night. He went away, but a sense of vulnerability lingered.
In her mid-30s she married Bill, a towering, soft-spoken blues musician and restaurateur who made her feel calm. She spent years trying to get pregnant, and when it happened her priorities narrowed.
“I became afraid of spontaneity and surprises,” she said. “I just wanted to be safe.”
In Irvine, she found a master-planned city where bars and liquor stores, pawnshops and homeless shelters had been methodically purged, where neighborhoods were regulated by noise ordinances, lawn-length requirements and mailbox-uniformity rules. For its size, Irvine consistently ranked as America’s safest city. It was 66 square miles, with big fake lakes, 54 parks, 219,000 people, and 62,912 trees. Anxiety about crime was poured into the very curve of the streets and the layout of the parks, all conceived on drawing boards to deter lawbreaking.
For all that outsiders mocked Irvine as a place of sterile uniformity, she had become comfortable in its embrace. She had been beguiled by the reputation of the schools, which boasted a 97% college-admission rate.
The muted beige strip malls teemed with tutoring centers. If neighboring Newport Beach had more conspicuous flourishes of wealth, like mega-yachts and ocean-cliff mansions, the status competition in Irvine — where so many of the big houses looked pretty much alike — centered on education.
Plaza Vista was a year-round public school in a coveted neighborhood, and after six years she knew the layout as well as her own kitchen. The trim campus buildings, painted to harmonize with the neighborhood earth tones, suggested a medical office-park; out back were an organic garden, a climbing wall and a well-kept athletic field fringed by big peach-colored homes.
Support our narrative journalism
Become a Los Angeles Times subscriber today to support stories like this one. Start getting full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.
Around campus, she was the mom everyone knew. She had a natural rapport with children. She could double them over with her impression of Applejack, the plucky country gal from the “My Little Pony” TV series. She would wait with them until their parents came to pick them up from the after-school program, but she couldn’t bring herself to enforce the dollar-a-minute late fines.
The school had given her a desk at the front office, which provided an up-close view of countless parental melodramas. The moms who wanted the 7th-grade math teacher fired because their kids got Bs. Or the mom who demanded a network of giant umbrellas and awnings to shield her kids from the playground sun.
Smile, Peters had learned. Be polite.
That afternoon — Feb. 16, 2011 — the karate teacher had texted her to say he was stuck in traffic, and would she please watch the class till he arrived? She was in the multi-purpose room, leading a cluster of tiny martial artists through their warm-up exercises, when a school administrator came in to find her. A policeman was at the front desk, asking for her by name.
She ran down the hall, seized by panic. She thought it must be about her husband, who was now working as a traveling wine salesman. He was on the road all the time, and she thought he’d been in an accident, maybe killed.
Officer Charles Shaver tried to calm her down. He was not here about her husband.
On a normal shift, Shaver could expect to handle barking-dog calls, noisy-neighbor calls, shoplifters and car burglaries, maybe a car wreck or two. He was a sniper on the Irvine Police SWAT team, armed with cutting-edge equipment that was the envy of other departments, but had never needed to pull the trigger. He was 40, a former NCIS investigator with the Marines.
He had been seven hours into an unmemorable shift when, at 1:15 p.m., a man called police to report a dangerous driver in a school parking lot.
“I was calling because, uh, my daughter’s a student at Plaza Vista Elementary School,” said the caller. “And uh, I’m concerned one of the parent volunteers there may be under, uh, under the influence or, uh, using drugs. I was, I just had to go over to the school and, uh, I was, I saw a car driving very erratically.”
The caller said he had seen drugs in the car. He knew the name of the driver — Kelli. He knew the type of car — a PT Cruiser. He even knew the license plate, and what was written on the frame — “Only 4 the Groovy.”
https://players.brightcove.net/3690581438001/default_default/index.html?directedMigration=true&videoId=ref:88718642&(Official transcript of the call to police.)
People were drifting in and out of the school with their kids, watching, as the policeman led Peters into the parking lot. His patrol car was blocking her PT Cruiser.
He told her about the caller’s claim that she had been driving erratically around 1:15 p.m.
That’s impossible, she said. She had parked her car and was inside the school by then.
Did she have anything in her car she shouldn’t have?
No.
Could he search her car?
Absolutely.
The drugs were easy to find. They were sticking out of the pouch behind the driver’s seat.
He put them on his hood, and she begged him to put them somewhere else. Her daughter might see. Anyone might see.
Someone must have planted them, she said. Sometimes, she left her car unlocked.
Shaver put the drugs in his trunk and led Peters back inside the school to a conference room. He peered into her pupils and checked her pulse. He made her touch her nose. He made her walk and turn. He made her close her eyes, tilt her head up and count silently to 30. She passed all the tests.
At some point her daughter arrived, as did her husband. She did not know what to tell them.
Shaver could have arrested Peters. Possessing pot on school grounds was a misdemeanor. Possessing narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet without a prescription was a felony. She could do time.
He could take her to the station, clock out by the end of his shift and be home in time for dinner. Instead, he kept asking questions.
He was patient and alert to detail, qualities ingrained in a sharpshooter trained to lie atop a building for hours, studying a window through a rifle scope.
He interviewed school administrators, who confirmed what Peters had said. She had arrived at the school office around 12:40. This meant the caller, who claimed to have just seen her at 1:15 p.m., had waited 35 minutes to report her, a gap that puzzled Shaver.
He tried to reach the number the caller had given. It was fake.
Shaver asked Peters if he could search her apartment. She agreed, reluctantly. If someone could plant drugs in her car, why couldn’t they do the same at her apartment?
She drove her PT Cruiser to her apartment about a block away, while Shaver and another officer followed. The apartment had a Jimi Hendrix print above the living room couch, and her daughter’s art hung on many of the walls.
Watch our chat on Facebook
Held Tuesday, Sept. 6
They had lived here since moving to Irvine, more than a decade back. They had found themselves consistently outbid in their attempt to buy a home. Money had been tight since she quit her job. She ran a small business called “Only 4 the Groovy,” painting tie-dyed jeans, but it didn’t pay the bills.
Now they were permanent renters, a condition she didn’t much mind, though she noticed how embarrassed neighbors became when acknowledging they were apartment dwellers, not owners. “This is only temporary,” they insisted. In affluent Irvine, your relation to the real estate you inhabited was one of the invisible class lines.
She watched as Shaver searched the kitchen cabinets, the bedrooms, the drawers, the couches, the patio. He was looking not just for drugs and drug paraphernalia, but for baggies that said EZY Dose Pill Pouch. He found nothing to link her to the drugs in her car.
By now, the case had lost its open-and-shut feel. In Shaver’s experience, no one left a bag of pot halfway out of a seat pouch, as if begging for it to be discovered. People typically hid their drugs in the glove box, or under the car seat. And for some reason — he didn’t know why — pot smokers didn’t typically keep their pipes inside the stash bag itself.
Peters was convinced she would be spending the night in jail. But after he had finished searching the apartment, Shaver told her that he was not going to take her in. The forensics team would be coming with the long Q-tips to take cheek swabs from her and her daughter, to take their prints and to scour the Cruiser for evidence.
If her DNA turned up on the drugs, she could still be charged.
The next morning, Shaver sat in the police chief’s conference room surrounded by department brass and detectives, walking them through a case that had quickly seized the interest of the command staff.
It seemed a much stranger scenario than a suburban mom with a pot-and-pill habit.
He had asked Kelli Peters:
If the drugs aren’t yours, how did they get in your car?
“I have an enemy,” she said.
This article appeared in print and online on August 28, 2016. Contact the reporter: Email | Twitter
Enjoying this series? Become a Los Angeles Times subscriber today to support stories like this one. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.
Chapter 2 | Read it from the beginning
By Christopher Goffard
The lawyers lived in a big house with a three-car garage and a Mediterranean clay-tile roof, on a block of flawless lawns and facades of repeating peach. The couple had three young children, a cat named Emerald and a closetful of board games. On their nightstand were photos of their wedding in Sonoma wine country.
Kent and Jill Easter were in their 30s, and wore their elite educations on their license plates: Stanford and UCLA Law School for him, Berkeley Law for her. Experts in corporate and securities law, they had met at a Palo Alto law firm.
She had quit her practice to become a stay-at-home mom in Irvine, and by appearance her daily routine was unexceptional: play dates at the community pool, sushi with girlfriends, hair salons, Starbucks, yoga. He was logging 60-hour workweeks as a partner in one of Orange County’s biggest law firms, with a 14th-floor office overlooking Newport Beach.
The story Kelli Peters told police about them, in February 2011, was a strange one. She was scared, and her voice kept cracking. A year earlier, the Easters had campaigned unsuccessfully to oust her from the school where she ran the after-school program. The ordeal had shaken her, but she thought it was over.
Now, after a phone tip led police to a stash of drugs in her car, she thought of the Easters. She thought, “They got me.”
It had started over something so small.
Feb. 17, 2010, had been a Wednesday, which meant it was one of the busiest afternoons of the week at Plaza Vista elementary in Irvine.
A tennis class had just ended on the playground behind the main administrative building, and Peters — volunteer director of the Afterschool Classroom Enrichment program, called ACE — had the task of rounding up the kids.
She would lead them into the building through the back door and hand them off to parents waiting on the sidewalk in front of the school.
The Easters’ 6-year-old son had been left outside briefly, waiting at the locked back door for someone to let him in. The man who ran the tennis class had found him and walked him to the front desk.
Jill Easter thought her son seemed upset and demanded to know what had happened.
Peters explained that the boy had been slow to line up, that he tended to take his time, so this wasn’t unusual. She said she hadn’t noticed he was missing when she scooped up the others.
“I apologized over and over,” Peters wrote in her account to school officials. “I gave him a hug and I thought she looked like she was OK with everything.”
Easter was not OK. She seemed fixated on the tennis coach, by Peters’ account, and wondered whether he had touched her son. Wasn’t it strange that the coach had brought him to the front? “I kept saying no, it’s not strange, a lot of my instructors bring the kids up,” Peters wrote.
The conversation made Peters uncomfortable, and she wanted to end it. “She made a comment as I walked away that she wondered how I could sleep at night with the way I treat people. I went inside and started crying I was so upset,” Peters wrote. “But the weird thing was she never changed her facial expression. It was always the same weird smile.”
The day after the confrontation, Jill Easter complained that her son had been “crying hysterically” after being locked out of the school building for 19 minutes. She wanted Peters gone.
“She told me that she blames my son because he is slow and he often gets left behind because it’s hard to wait for him,” Jill Easter wrote to school officials. “For the record, my son is very intelligent, mature and athletic and has successfully participated in many ACE classes. He is receiving good grades and has earned many awards this year. He is not mentally or physically slow by any standard.”
The district ACE director, in her own reports on the incident, wrote that she’d interviewed the coach, as well as the Easters, and concluded that “nothing happened” to the boy, who had been left outside for “closer to 5-8 minutes.”
What, then, could account for Jill Easter’s ire? It seemed to boil down to a single word, misheard as an insult. The director wrote that Easter thought Peters had called her son “intellectually slow, not pokey slow.”
Peters adored the Easters’ son. She knew him as a quiet kid, smart, prone to daydream, a participant in the school arts program that she had worked hard to keep alive. He would race up to her, proud of his drawings. “I thought he was amazing,” she said.
Peters’ friends suggested that maybe the boy’s attachment to her played some role in engendering the mother’s rancor. Peters did not know. “Maybe he’d go home and say, ‘Ms. Kelli, Ms. Kelli, Ms. Kelli,’” she said.
School principal Heather Phillips talked to Jill Easter by phone, the week after the incident. Easter said that she “didn’t want other children to be hurt,” Phillips wrote. “She mentioned that both she and her husband are attorneys.”
Phillips had learned that Easter was approaching parents on campus to rail against Peters. This could be construed as harassment, the principal told Easter. The school had a rule about civility.
“She stated that what she is doing isn’t harassment, that she is fully within her rights and that she is going to continue until Kelli is gone,” Phillips wrote. “She also stated that she might be making a sticker or sign for her car stating what Kelli had done.”
Peters, who had volunteered for years without controversy, was badly shaken. She worried how the attention might affect the school.
If you want me to leave, she told the principal, I will.
Of course not, the principal replied.
Jill Easter demanded that the Irvine police look into it. They did. There had been no crime.
She requested a restraining order, claiming that Peters was “harassing and stalking myself and my 6-year-old son,” and had threatened to kill her. The court threw it out.
Then came the civil suit, filed by Kent Easter, claiming his son had been the victim of “false imprisonment” and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” He had suffered “extreme and severe mental anguish,” the suit claimed. “The acts of Defendant PETERS alleged above were willful, wanton, malicious, and oppressive, and justify the awarding of exemplary and punitive damages.”
The Easters dropped the suit. As a result of their complaints, the school required a head count before children were released from the after-school program. And the Easters got a refund on their ACE tuition. Otherwise, the power couple lost. The school stood by its longtime volunteer, and in early 2011 she was elected president of the PTA.
Peters struck Det. Mark Andreozzi as genuinely scared. Alerted by a mysterious caller, police had searched her car in the school parking lot on Feb. 16, 2011, and found a stash of marijuana, a ceramic pipe and painkillers in baggies labeled EZY Dose Pill Pouch.
Peters told police something she recalled Jill Easter saying during their original confrontation: “I will get you.”
The drugs had appeared nearly a year to the day since that incident — the third Wednesday of February — and Peters did not think the timing was coincidental.
Still, she could not be positive the Easters were behind the drugs in her car. She told police there was another possibility — a 43-year-old dad who lived across the street from the school and had a reputation for bizarre behavior.
Support our narrative journalism
Become a Los Angeles Times subscriber today to support stories like this one. Start getting full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.
Police knew him well. They had responded to complaints about him wandering onto campus without permission, ranting at school staff, heckling the crossing guard, and videotaping the crosswalk as kids moved through it. At least once, he showed up in a Batman costume, masked and caped, to pick up his son.
He made parents nervous; Peters had felt sorry for him. But now she recalled how he’d wanted her PTA job, how he’d even asked her for copies of the bylaws. Maybe he had studied them, and knew that drug possession would disqualify her from her position.
Cops have an informal phrase for such people, who do not quite meet the requirements of a 51-50, the code for an involuntary psychiatric hold. They are 51-49½, vexing but hard to do anything about.
At the Irvine Police Department, some cops thought, “It has to be him.” He seemed a likelier culprit than two lawyers they had never heard of.
Andreozzi was a former highway patrolman who had worked narcotics for years. He wore plain clothes, a beard and a half-Mohawk. As the lead detective on the case, he had been given carte blanche. Safety and schools were the twin pillars of Irvine’s pride.
He couldn’t rule Peters out for drug possession just because she came off as sympathetic. He checked her record. It was clean. He asked about her at the school. “Everyone loves her,” the principal said.
Andreozzi played the call that had summoned police to the school on Feb. 16, 2011. When the dispatcher asked for his name, the caller had said, “VJ Chandrasckhr” and spelled it out. The caller claimed to have a daughter at Plaza Vista, but the school had nobody by that name.
Andreozzi listened to the call again and again. He noticed that the caller stuttered nervously, and volunteered more information than a typical caller did, as if following a script.
Andreozzi noticed, too, that while the caller started off speaking in standard American English, he inexplicably acquired an Indian accent midway through the conversation — a faint, halfhearted one — as if suddenly deciding the name he’d given required it.
Some of Andreozzi’s colleagues believed it was Peters’ PTA rival, trying to disguise his voice.
They traced the call. It had been placed from a wall-mounted phone in the ground-floor business office at the Island Hotel, an elegant high-rise resort in Newport Beach.
Det. Matt McLaughlin went to the hotel basement to study surveillance footage. On the screen, people moved in and out of the lobby. He was looking for the PTA rival, a 5-foot-8 Asian man in his early 40s. There was no sign of him.
There was, however, a tall, lanky figure he did not recognize — a man in a dark suit who walked calmly toward the business center just before the call.
“It looks like Kent Easter,” the school principal said, when shown the footage.
Andreozzi’s team began following the Easters, learning their habits.
They learned that Kent Easter’s office was just a few hundred feet from the Island Hotel.
They discovered that the couple’s home on Santa Eulalia street in Irvine was about a mile from Peters’ apartment.
The iPhone had been pinging off the cellphone tower nearest the Easters’ home. The BlackBerry was pinging off a different tower, the one near Peters’ apartment complex, where her PT Cruiser had been parked in the outdoor lot.
The lot had a code-activated gate, but was easy to infiltrate for anyone patient enough to follow another car in.
Every time Kelli Peters talked to police, she had a powerful guilty feeling. She was sure they would discover every bad and semi-bad thing she had ever done.
Like how she became frustrated with Irvine’s interminable stoplights and did not adhere religiously to the posted speeds. Like how she had once hurled her company-issued smartphone out her car window, on the day she quit the mortgage business in disgust. She was sure they’d stumble onto something.
Peters found a therapist. She described how police had discovered the drugs in her car, and how she had insisted over and over that they weren’t hers. How police had not arrested her but still might, any day.
The therapist looked incredulous and said, “How did you get out of that? Nobody gets out of that.”
It occurred to Peters that her own therapist might not believe her. She wondered how many other people, even her friends, harbored doubts. She thought, “Would I believe me?”
They had worked quietly for weeks, watching the Easters, learning their habits, and now the detectives were prepared to move. Early on the morning of March 4, 2011, a small army of Irvine police — nearly two dozen — gathered at the station to rehearse the plan. They would serve search warrants simultaneously at Kent Easter’s Newport Beach office and at the couple’s home.
Andreozzi and his team had debated how to get Kent Easter to talk. They had to get him alone, away from his colleagues. They would be foolish to underestimate his intelligence. But they thought that a man accustomed to winning with his brain might be undone by his faith in its powers.
So they would come on gently, playing dumb. Their edge was asymmetrical knowledge; he didn’t know what they knew. The team followed Easter’s Toyota Camry hybrid as he drove to work in Newport Beach. The vanity plate read UCLAJD1 in a Stanford University frame.
Easter had just pulled into the garage, into his reserved parking spot, when Andreozzi climbed out of his car and hailed him, and was joined moments later by another plainclothesman.
Their questions were vague: Was he aware of anything that had happened recently at Plaza Vista elementary?
At first Easter seemed happy to talk. He had a problem last year, he said. His son had been locked out of the school, and a school volunteer had berated him for being slow. He and his wife had filed complaints, but then moved on.
“We didn’t want to press the issue,” Easter said. “Bygones be bygones.”
They mentioned the name Kelli Peters. Easter said he had never met her, didn’t even know what she looked like.
As the questions grew more pointed, Andreozzi watched Easter cross his arms. He no longer seemed happy to see the detectives.
“Are you recording this, by the way?” Easter asked.
“Yeah,” Andreozzi said.
Had he heard of anything happening to Peters lately? Had she been in trouble?
No.
Now Andreozzi’s partner, Det. Wayne Brannon, said, “Got any idea what the heck we’re talking about?”
“No.”
Brannon told Easter he had been following him. He had seen him coming out of the dry cleaners.
“You gotta ask yourself, as an educated man, why in the heck would I be following you around? ’Cause that’s all I do. I work in criminal investigations. All I do is follow people around. I learn their little habits,” Brannon said. “You gotta start asking yourself, ‘Why are we standing in front of you, talking to you?’”
“I definitely am.”
https://players.brightcove.net/3690581438001/default_default/index.html?directedMigration=true&videoId=ref:88761190&(Irvine Police Department)
They told him to think back, about 2½ weeks ago. Was there any reason he would have been out in the small hours of the morning?
Now and then he ran out for diapers, Easter said, but odds are he was home.
Easter now looked very nervous, and when he was nervous he did what the caller had done. He began to stutter.
“I want you to use that big brain of yours, mouth closed, listen,” Brannon told him. “At some point during this conversation you’re going to have to make a big-boy decision, and that’s gonna be on you.”
In the age of computers and technology and cell phones, Brannon said, “Big Brother’s always watching. We’re absolutely not the smartest guys in the shed, OK? But we can follow the dots from one to the next to the next.”
They knew, he said, that Easter’s phone had been pinging in the middle of the night near Peters’ apartment. And if there was DNA on the drugs in Peters’ car, they would find it.
Brannon said, “I would hope and pray for your sake that there’s a big light going off, big bells going off. Knowing what I just told you, is there anything that you would like to add to your statement to me, whether retracting or adding anything to your statement?”
“I would like to get a lawyer.”
“That’s the big-boy answer.”
The search warrant crackled as Andreozzi pulled it out of his back pocket. In the center console of Easter’s car were some diet pills. They were in a miniature plastic baggie. The label said EZY Dose Pill Pouch.
