Maryland man doses dad’s tea with drugs to move $400,000 in crypto - The Washington Post

The cup of warm tea seemed like a perfectly kind gesture. Even more so, court records show, when the server poured in some white powder for what he promised would be a safe energy boost.

“It’s really good for you,” Liam Ghershony, 24, told his father.

Unknown to the recipient, the powder was a benzodiazepine, a class of depressants that includes drugs like Xanax, and was delivered in a dose large enough to purposely knock him out. Then, free to use his father’s cellphone, Ghershony tapped through a two-step authorization to hack into a $400,000 cryptocurrency account.

“It didn’t have to be like this!” he wrote in notes he left behind for his father, adding that he was trying to help them both. “I’m gonna give you the best retirement.”

Two days later — after a worried friend of the older Ghershony couldn’t reach him and called the police — officers found him on his bedroom floor, breathing but unresponsive. He was rushed to a hospital, where he spent four days recovering from severe dehydration and acute organ dysfunction.

“It was outrageous,” Montgomery County Circuit Judge David Lease later told Liam Ghershony at the recent conclusion to his criminal case. “It was just beyond the pale.”

It was also — for all its bizarre particulars — a case that covered more common grounds: domestic violence; mental illness; the crippling effects of benzodiazepine abuse; and, for the parents of drug addicts, the steep challenges of when to extend another chance and when to set hard boundaries.

Ghershony, now 25, was initially charged by police with attempted murder — a count prosecutors soon learned overstated his intentions. He pleaded guilty to felony assault, spent 125 days in jail and was spared further punishment by undergoing two months of residential drug and mental health treatment. The sentence reflected his lack of a criminal record, his parents’ wishes and Lease’s calculation that rehab was the best course.

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“I did a lot of crazy and messed up stuff when I was using,” the younger Ghershony said in an interview. “I will carry that with me — the guilt and the shame. And I want to take that on as I throw myself into recovery.”

The only child to parents who divorced when he was 3, Ghershony grew up in the affluent suburb of Bethesda just north of Washington. He excelled in competitive tennis and, after high school, he started an online clothing consignment business.

Ghershony began advising his father on a relatively new form of investing through cryptocurrencies, which are essentially online computer codes that allow people to store and send value online. The older Ghershony found it helpful.

“He’d said, ‘Dad, you’re too emotional. You’re too attached to the coin,’ ” the father recalled in an interview.

The Washington Post generally does not identify victims of violent crimes without their consent. The older Ghershony, who spoke on the condition that his first name not be used, said he made his son a partner in a $100,000 investing account. As it soared in value, the two cashed out part of their crypto holdings in 2018 and earned an after-tax profit of about $350,000, according to the father and son.

The younger Ghershony’s use of drugs, though, began to spiral. He took massive amounts of benzodiazepines coupled with Adderall and cocaine, according to court records. He blacked out daily, rotating from his condo to living with family to going missing.

“I thought I was going to lose him,” the older Ghershony said.

As his son’s paranoia grew, so too did his fixation with the plummeting price of their bitcoin holdings. But by then, the older Ghershony — concerned over his son’s judgment — had put the two-step lock on their investment accounts.

“Dad you need to sell,” the older Ghershony recalled his son telling him.

“No, you need to stop doing drugs,” the father responded.

Liam Ghershony soon launched his hacking plan. He had spent the day helping move furniture into his dad’s loft apartment in the Bethesda Row district. They ate dinner at a nearby restaurant and returned to the apartment where the younger Ghershony fixed two mugs of the powder-spiked, ostensibly energy-inducing tea, according to court records.

The concoction quickly put his dad to sleep, concerning enough to the younger Ghershony that he fastened an Apple Watch around his dad’s wrist to monitor his heartbeat. Then, using his dad’s phone for authorization, he moved $400,000 of bitcoin to an account he could control, and converted two-thirds of it to another cryptocurrency, Ethereum.

Ghershony left his dad passed out and alone in the apartment under the assumption he’d wake up, Ghershony said in an interview. But he failed to realize the effect of such a dose of a benzodiazepine on a non-addict. “I obviously had a massive tolerance,” he said.

In the days after, though, Ghershony grew worried as he couldn’t reach his dad on his phone or get him to answer his locked door. He called his father’s ex-girlfriend, who couldn’t reach him either, and she called 911 asking that officers go check on him. They found the older Ghershony on his floor but didn’t immediately know about the tea.

That began to change on May 14 when Liam Ghershony’s mother, Christine Prefontaine, called police to report that her son had admitted to “dosing” his father.

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For Prefontaine, the call represented a mix of terror, opportunity and affection. Over the previous 18 months, she had persuaded her son to enter two drug treatment programs, only to see him relapse. She’d also told him he couldn’t stay with her and her husband if he was actively using.

“I very strategically made a case against my son to force him into care and to protect our community,” Prefontaine said in an interview.

Detectives visited the older Ghershony in the hospital. He remembered his son served him tea that was supposed to give him more energy, according to records in the case, but said he told the detectives he had no memory of what happened next.

“I’m worried about my son, of course,” he told them, according to records in the case. “He’s a good kid overall.”

Five days later, detectives charged the younger Ghershony with attempted first-degree murder. As prosecutors later dug into the case, though, they found no evidence he purposely tried to kill his father.

“However, there was an intent to inflict serious bodily injury by the drugging, by the causing him to be unconscious,” Assistant State’s Attorney Donna Fenton said in court, adding, “But for the grace of God, Mr. Ghershony is still with us.”

She and Ghershony’s attorney, Steve Chaikin, worked out a plea agreement to a first-degree assault charge. A behavioral health expert who had evaluated Liam Ghershony testified at his sentencing, attributing the crime to anxiety and addiction to benzodiazepines.

Abuse of the drugs, nationwide, goes relatively unnoticed compared to opiates and cocaine, said Keith Humphreys, an addictions expert and psychiatry professor at Stanford University. Every year, he said, about 2,000 people fatally overdose from the drug and another 8,000 die after combining benzodiazepines with another substance.

People who use benzodiazepines legally often see their anxieties calmed through prescriptions. At increased doses though, the drug can produce wild mood swings, rendering the anxieties someone sought to calm more pronounced and more debilitating, Humphreys said. In that context, Humphreys said, knocking out your father to hack into a crypto account might seem rational.

“That’s the power of that drug,” Humphreys said, “and the power it has to change us.”

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Fenton, the prosecutor, cited past instances when the younger Ghershony had assaulted his father. She said those cases hadn’t been reported, as often happens among family members.

“This is a domestic violence case,” Fenton said in court. “This is a father and a son, not our typical couple that we would see.”

She asked for more local jail time followed by a lengthy period of “suspended” backup time that could send him to a prison within the Maryland Division of Correction (DOC) if he were to violate the terms of his probation.

Lease ordered drug treatment and imposed 20 years of suspended time, warning him: “If there’s an act of violence subsequent to this, you go to the DOC.”

Ghershony now lives in a group house in Rockville with other recovering addicts and takes part in outpatient drug treatment. He has been working on repairs to his Subaru with his dad. They meet regularly and talk about Liam’s intention to pursue a career in industrial design.

It’s left his father optimistic, noting his son is more interested in addiction-recovery meetings than past forms of socialization: “If someone wants to meet him and they’re from the past, he tells them they have to meet him at a meeting.”

Ghershony’s attorney, Chaikin, has interacted with the parents of drug addicts throughout his career — as a prosecutor, a defense attorney and as a regular speaker to parent groups and schools.

“Calling the police on your child is excruciating. It’s often a last resort,” he says, repeating a theme in his talks, “but it’s a lot less painful than burying your child.”

Ghershony’s mother, Prefontaine, a professional in the field of public health and Human Centered Design said too often parents like her become “polarized between ‘being powerless’ and ‘involving the criminal system.’”

But she sees a change in her son. “I hear him being serious about treatment in a way that he’s never been,” she said. “He’s back to being the kinder version of himself.”

Ghershony recently started a job at a take-out deli.

“I definitely have said I’m sorry to my dad,” he said. “But I feel like I can say only so much. I need to show him, and myself, through actions how much I’ve changed.”