The Medford pharmacy killings: A 15-year-old spotlight on Long Island's opioid crisis - Newsday

Rail-thin and hiding under a fake beard, a former Army intelligence analyst walked into a Medford pharmacy 15 years ago Friday, fatally shot all four people inside but stole neither the cash in the register nor the valuables on the dead. Instead, he stuffed his backpack with thousands of addictive painkillers and walked out. That pharmacy, Haven Drugs, has since moved to another Medford strip mall. The killer and his getaway driver, also his wife, spend their days and nights in maximum security prisons. A Queens painkiller clinic operator, who had illegally prescribed the killer more than 2,500 oxycodone and other pain pills, was convicted and died in state prison. Jaime Taccetta, who died in the Father's Day 2011 shootings, with her daughter Kaitlin. Credit: None/Taccetta family New legislation, including tighter restrictions on access to prescription opioids, stepped-up law enforcement and a heightened awareness of opioids on Long Island and across the country also followed the robbery. As for Long Island overdose deaths, they have fallen in recent years. David Laffer is led into Suffolk County Police Department headquarters on June 22, 2011, after his arrest for the Haven Drugs killings. Credit: James Carbone For James Manzella, the violent scene he walked into on June 19, 2011, seemed so senseless. He spotted the killer, David Laffer, leaving Haven Drugs that Sunday morning, felt something was suspicious and exited his vehicle. Inside the mom-and-pop pharmacy, he found his fiancee, Jaime Taccetta, dead, along with another customer, a pharmacist and a clerk. From breaking news to special features and documentaries, the NewsdayTV team is covering the issues that matter to you. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. "I have no mercy for that guy," Manzella, 51, of Farmingville, told Newsday, referring to Laffer. "The guy could have robbed the store, left everybody intact and got a slap on the wrist. ... Maybe he would have got caught, maybe he wouldn’t have, but at least four people would have walked away with their lives." Melinda Brady, who drove the getaway car after the pharmacy killings, shown seated in a Suffolk police vehicle after her arrest. Credit: Newsday /John Paraskevas New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan, who prosecuted Dr. Stan Li, a pain management specialist, for illegally prescribing narcotics to Laffer, told Newsday the Medford killings signaled a new brazenness rarely seen among pharmacy holdups.  "This was by far the boldest one that I recall seeing," Brennan said, adding it was "clearly planned." "He was in and out relatively quickly and just fired the shots and killed people," Brennan said. "It caught a lot of people’s attention and so I’m sure that it helped move some of the efforts to try to get this under control forward." Haven Drugs pharmacist Raymond Ferguson, with his wife, Viedya Sabrina Quail-Ferguson, was working for a colleague when he died in the Medford shootings. Credit: Ferguson family In 2011, before the pharmacy killings, Brennan's office established a Prescription Drug Investigation Unit. Investigators learned that Li, who treated Laffer for pain, was among several physicians doling out a "significant" number of oxycodone and hydromorphone scripts compared to years prior, she said.  It was a time when patients cut off from their opioids "went to drastic means in order to get prescriptions to not be sick," Dr. Jarid Pachter, who practices addiction medicine through the Stony Brook Medicine-affiliated Southold Family Medicine, told Newsday. Other addiction specialists familiar with the case said it marked a "boiling point" of the opioid crisis. "People began to understand this was an issue for the larger society," said Jeffrey Reynolds, president and chief executive of the Family & Children's Association, a Garden-City based nonprofit that provides help for substance use among other services. Jennifer Mejia, a 17-year-old clerk who died in the pharmacy shootings, would send money earned to her grandmother in El Salvador and others in need there. Credit: Mejia family "When people are walking around sick and desperate, that has implications for the entire community," Reynolds said. "This now was seen as a public health crisis that can affect anybody on an average Sunday morning." Laffer, a 1995 Patchogue-Medford High School graduate and former Army private who worked in intelligence, had lost his clerk job two weeks before the pharmacy killings. At point-blank range, according to a Newsday story at the time, he executed pharmacist Raymond Ferguson, 45, of Centereach; store clerk Jennifer Mejia, 17, of Medford; customer Bryon Sheffield, 71, also of Medford; and Taccetta, 33, of Farmingville.  Ferguson was covering a shift so another pharmacist could celebrate Father's Day with his family. Mejia was buried with the high school diploma she would have received on her graduation day. Sheffield was picking up a prescription for his wife of nearly half a century. Taccetta, a mother of two, was also picking up a prescription. She was buried in her wedding dress.   Bryon Sheffield, 71, was at Haven Drugs to pick up a prescription for his wife when David Laffer shot him to death. Credit: Sheffield family Then-Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer described the scene as "one of the most heinous, brutal crimes we've ever experienced." A three-day search — fueled by phone tips, a fingerprint Laffer left on a piece of paper at the pharmacy, and help from Brennan’s office — culminated in a successful raid at his Medford home on Pitchpine Place. Laffer, 48, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence at the Elmira Correctional Facility with no chance for parole. His wife, Melinda Brady, 44, pleaded guilty to robbery and is serving 25 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She could be released as early as 2032 following an appearance before the parole board, according to corrections department records. Laffer, and the havoc unleashed by his .45 caliber pistol, "absolutely" raised awareness that opioid addiction was a public health crisis, said Ann-Marie Foster, president and CEO of Phoenix House, which helps Long Islanders and New York City residents with addictions overcome them. "When you’re addicted like that, your body is craving it, and you’ll do all sorts of things to get it," Foster said. "It was a wake-up call." A surveillance-camera image of David Laffer inside Haven Drugs on June 19, 2011. Credit: James Carbone Newsday reported that Laffer and Brady had been prescribed almost 12,000 pain pills from various doctors in the four years preceding the Haven Drugs holdup, including more than 2,500 from Li, whom Brennan later prosecuted. During that same time, robberies at pharmacies in which addictive painkillers were stolen were on the rise on the Island and across the country. The day after the Medford homicides, Brennan said her office investigated whether any of Li’s patients ever filled prescriptions at Haven Drugs. Two did: Laffer and Brady. That information was passed along to the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office, which helped build the case against the couple, Newsday previously reported. Li was eventually arrested, charged and convicted on two counts of manslaughter, six counts of criminal endangerment and 180 counts of illegal sales of prescriptions for controlled substances, including selling to Laffer. Li was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison in 2014. He died in 2020 at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, according to the state corrections department. Advocates for substance abuse treatment told Newsday the most significant state legislation aimed at restricting opioids since the killings was the Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing Act, known as I-STOP. The law requires medical providers to check a state-created system for their patients' histories of receiving prescriptions for controlled substances. As a result, Pachter said, "I never get patients coming in specifically for these prescriptions anymore." When physicians consult the prescription monitoring program and catch a patient "doctor shopping," or getting addictive pills from various providers, Pachter said, they should "do a more thorough investigation" before deciding the best care to offer. "If that person has opioid use disorder, then you discuss treatment for that as opposed to something that could enable the addiction or make them worse," he said. To further restrict the prescription opioid supply, in 2016, doctors were barred from writing scripts by hand. "Prescription pads were being stolen," Brennan said. "Sometimes the pads or the paper was sold rather than prescriptions or pills." Manzella, the first to enter the scene and who testified against Laffer, said that while he never married after the death of Taccetta, he chose "to not let one man basically ruin my life." "Me and my friends and my family, we all have good memories of her," he said of his fiancee. "We had good times. She was a wonderful woman, an unbelievable mom. ... I got to go forward in some way, shape or form. I had no choice. But you can never get back what those people took from everybody." To this day, Manzella said he still feels for the other families who were forever changed on that Father's Day. For Lesly Gonzalez and her family, "even though time has passed, a part of us has frozen in time," she said. Gonzalez was 16 when Mejia, her older sister, was killed in a manner "so sudden and so violent." Mejia's job at Haven Drugs helped her earn money to send to her grandmother in El Salvador and others in need there. "People always ask me, ‘Do you have any siblings?’ I always mention her," said Gonzalez, 31, of East Patchogue. "I’m like, ‘Yes, I do,’ but then I have to tell them, and it’s something that becomes a part of you. You learn to live with the pain of losing someone and you don’t forget them. You don’t just move on from something like that." In recent years, experts said the state has invested in local nonprofits; police departments continued to not only seize drugs but introduce communities to the opioid overdose-reversal nasal spray naloxone, commonly known as Narcan; and opioid settlement funds have made treatment more widespread. But there was "a lag time" between the crackdown on the pill problem and the bolstering of treatment, substance use advocate Reynolds said. "If the state had created that treatment availability at the very same time it restricted the supply, we might have seen a faster resolution, we might have seen fewer overdose fatalities," Reynolds said. "There was a shortage on the street, the price of prescription pills went up, people turned to heroin, to fentanyl, to other drugs. ... Now we’ve resolved some of that because treatment availability is far better than it’s ever been in Long Island’s history, but it’s probably still not enough." Nicholas Grasso covers breaking news for Newsday. A Long Island native, he previously worked at several community newspapers and lifestyle magazines based on the East End. Sarra Sounds Off, Ep. 38: State champions On the latest episode of "Sarra Sounds Off," Newsday's Gregg Sarra, Michael Sicoli and Tess Ferguson recap the the state championships in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, plus Jared Valuzzi has the plays of the week. Get more on these and other NewsdayTV stories Sarra Sounds Off, Ep. 38: State champions On the latest episode of "Sarra Sounds Off," Newsday's Gregg Sarra, Michael Sicoli and Tess Ferguson recap the the state championships in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, plus Jared Valuzzi has the plays of the week. Get more on these and other NewsdayTV stories