Matthew Perry's Assistant Is Sentenced, a $250M Scheme to Starve Kids, and a Teen Shot Scouting Homecoming Photos

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. It's Friday, May twenty ninth, twenty twenty six. We end a lot of cases on this show, but we don't close many of them. Today we close one. For the better part of a year, we have been following the people who fed Matthew Perry the ketamine that killed him, the doctor, the dealer, the chain of hands that money passed through. On Wednesday, the last one finally stood in front of a judge. And of all the people charged in this case, he is the one who knew Perry the longest, was trusted the most, and had exactly one job to keep him alive. We'll start there.

0:49 Then we go to Minneapolis, where a woman who built a charity with the words feeding our Future in the name was sentenced to nearly forty two years in prison for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars that was supposed to put food in the mouths of children, not a metaphor actual kids, actual meals that were built for and never served. And she was just the first domino because minutes after her sentence came down, prosecutors charged fifteen more people, and then Colorado. Two teenage boys go looking for a pretty spot to. Take homecoming pictures. They make one small mistake, and a grown man with a loaded handgun decides the appropriate response is to put a bullet in a seventeen year old's face. He says it was an accident. We'll let you hear both sides, because that trial is happening right now. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. Two of these three stories are about people who looked at someone vulnerable and saw an opportunity. Let's get into it. This is daily crime and justice. If you've been with us a while, you already know most of this story because we've been telling it in pieces for the better part of a year.

2:00 Back in December, we sat with the sentencing of doctor Salvador Placentsia, the licensed physician who sold Matthew Perry ketamine at a markup and in a text message to another doctor called the man he was selling to a moron. Placentsia got thirty months. In April, we covered Jasvine Senga, the woman prosecutor's nicknamed the ketamine Queen, the dealer whose product was in Perry's body. The day he died, she got fifteen years. And every single time we covered one of these hearings, I told you the same thing. There were still names on the list. There were still people who had not yet had to stand up in a courtroom and answer for what happened. On Wednesday, the last name on that list stood up.

2:42 Kenneth Iwamasa is sixty one years old. He was Matthew Perry's living personal assistant. On Wednesday, in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, he was sentenced to forty one months in prison, a little under three and a half years, and ordered to pay a ten thousand dollars fine after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute. Ketamine causing death. And with that, the criminal case around Matthew Perry's death is for all practical purposes. Over five people were charged. All five have now been sentenced. The book is closed. So let me tell you who Kenneth Ewamasa is. Because he is not like the others. He is not a doctor who saw a famous patient as a payday. He is not a dealer who marketed himself to celebrities. Kenneth Ewamasa had known Matthew Perry since nineteen ninety two, more than three decades. Perry's family knew him trusted him.

3:34 They have said in. Their own words that they had known Kenny for twenty five years and that Matthew trusted Kenny, and that they all trusted Kenny. And here is the part that I keep coming back to his job, his actual number one, this is why you are here. Job was to keep Matthew Perry sober, to be the companion and the guardian in a fight against addiction that Perry had been waging publicly and bravely for most of his adult life. Perry's family has said that in the past, when the drugs got the better of him, Matthew would hide away so no one would know, and that became the family signal to step in and get him help. The whole point of having Kenny was so that someone trusted was inside the house, so that someone would catch it. Instead, prosecutors say, Kenny became the enabler and the supplier. I want to walk you through what happened in the last weeks of Matthew Perry's life, and I'm not gonna do it day by day because the calendar isn't the point. The point is the slope of it. Sometime in the fall of twenty twenty three, Perry, who was getting legal supervised ketemine treatments for depression, which is a real and increasingly common therapy, wanted more than his regular doctor would give him, and so he asked Iwamasa to help him find ketamine off the books. From there, a supply chain assembled itself around a vulnerable man. Placentia showed up, sold vials and taught Iwamasa how to do the injections himself. When Placentia's supply

5:05 ran thin, an acquaintance connected them to Sanga, the dealer, who, in the words of the people brokering it, only worked with high end clients and celebrities. Money moved, vials moved. In the final month of his life, prosecutors say Iwamasa bought more than fifty vials of ketamine over the course of about eleven days, and the injections escalated. By the end, Iwamasa was giving Perry multiple shots a day, six eight injections in a day. This is no longer anything resembling treatment. This is a man being fed as surgical anesthetic by the person who was supposed to be protecting him. On the morning of October twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, Iwamasa gave Perry a shot, then around lunchtime another and in the early afternoon, with Perry sitting near the hot tub in the backyard of the home they shared in Pacific Palisades, Iwa Maasa gave him a third. Perry told him in words the assistant later repeated to investigators to shoot me up with a big one. Then Iwamasa left to run errands.

6:08 When he came home a couple of hours later, he found Matthew Perry face down in the water. Paramedics arrived within minutes. They declared him dead. He was fifty four years old. And here is where I stopped being sad and start being something else. When the police were standing in that house, Kenneth Iwamasa did not tell them about the ketamine. He did not tell them about his own role in it. He hid the evidence. The autopsy would later find that the acute effects of ketamine were the primary cause of death, with drowning secondary. But on the day it happened, the one person who knew exactly what had been going into Matthew Perry's veins said nothing Now to be fair, and I want to be fair. Iwamasa eventually did cooperate. When investigators came back with a search warrant, he admitted his role. He pointed them toward the other people in the chain. He became al along with another witness, an essential part of the case the government built against the doctors and the dealer. His cooperation is a real part of why the others were convicted, and it is part of why his own sentence forty one months, is what it is rather than something far longer. In court, Iwamasa apologized. He told the room, you all know how much Matthew loved you. I'm so sorry to have done illegal acts. I will forever regret it, and I will take it to my grave. He said he wanted to be a cautionary tale. He offered his condolences to the family, and the family was right there to hear it. Matthew

7:39 Perry's mother, Suzanne Morrison, sat in that courtroom on Wednesday, with her husband, the journalist Keith Morrison, beside her, the same way they have sat through these hearings one after another. In her victim impact statement, Suzanne did not scream. She did something quieter and harder. She explained the trust. She wrote that they had been leaved when Matthew took on an assistant who they believed understood the fight, that Kenny's most important job by far was to be her son's companion and guardian against addiction. And then she wrote the sentence that I cannot get out of my head. Matthew trusted Kenny. We trusted Kenny. Both things can be true here, and I think they are. I think Kenneth Ewamasa loved Matthew Perry thirty three years is not a job, it's a life shared. And I also think that he handed his friend the needle again and again and again until his friend was dead in the water. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and the second one is the one that matters in a courtroom, because love is not a defense to filling a syringe.

8:46 Five defendants, the doctor who called him a moron, the doctor who supplied the supplier, the dealer who branded herself for the famous and the desperate, the acquaintance who made the connection, and the friend of thirty three years who pushed in the plunger. Every one of them looked at a man fighting for his life and saw, in their own way a use for him. Matthew Perry was chandler bing for an entire generation, and then he turned out to be a far more interesting and honest human being than any character he ever played. A man who wrote a whole book about his addiction precisely so that the next person might not die from theirs. He deserved people around him who acted like it. The case is closed. Now, the accounting is done.

9:29 Matthew. We said your name in December and in April, and we're saying it again today. Rest easy. Let's go to Minnesota and let's talk about what is, by the government's own description, one of the largest pandemic era frauds in the history of this country. Here's the setup, and the setup matters. During COVID, the federal government ran child nutrition programs money meant to make sure that kids who relied on school meals didn't go hungry. While the world was shut down. To keep food moving fast in an emergency, a lot of the normal guardrails around those programs were loosened on purpose.

10:15 Nobody wanted a hungry seven year old waiting on paperwork. The rules were kept laxed so the system wouldn't seize up. That was a choice made in good faith to protect children, and a group of people in Minnesota looked at that open door and walked straight through it with a moving truck. At the center of it, prosecutors say, was a woman named Amy Bach, the founder of a nonprofit called and I want you to hear the name Feeding Our Future. The organization was supposed to be a sponsor that funneled federal food money to sites that fed kids. Instead, prosecutors say it became the hub of a scheme to invent meals that were never served to children who in many cases did not exist at sites that were barely real, and to pocket the reimbursements.

11:00 Over the life of the. Scheme, more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in federal funds was taken. Only about fifty million has been recovered. The rest is gone. On Thursday, a little over a year after a jury convicted her of wire fraud and bribery, Amy Bach, the person prosecutors called the Mastermind, was sentenced to five hundred months in federal prison. Five hundred months that is nearly forty two years. She was also ordered to personally pay back more than two hundred and forty two million dollars in restitution, which is a number she will never in any realistic sense, repay, As one prosecutor put it outside the courthouse, No matter how you cut it, it is a massive figure. Before she was sentenced, back told the judge, I don't have the words to express just how horrible I feel. I know I'm responsible. Her attorney said she was devastated by the length of the sentence and signaled this is not the end of the road, which in lawyer means appeal. Now, white color sentences are often shorter than people expect, and there's usually grumbling when they come down. This one came down hard, and I want to explain why, because two law professors quoted in the coverage put it better than I could. The first point is mechanical. Federal sentencing guidelines for fraud are driven heavily by the dollar amount of the loss, and here the lost number is enormous. The second point is moral, as one professor put it, When you say you are giving food to children and you take the money instead,

12:33 that is about as horrific as white collar crime gets. This wasn't skimming from investors who can afford a loss. The victims were taxpayers, and the cover story was hungry kids. And here is the thing that I think actually deserves your contempt. There's a playbook for this emergency. Loosens the rules, Money floods in fast, oversight gets thin, and a certain kind of person sees not a crisis to help with, but a vault left unlocked. They didn't stumble into temptation. They built an organization, gave it a warm and noble name, and used the image of feeding children as camouflage for theft. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. It's a business plan.

13:14 And Bach was just the first one to fall. Within minutes of her sentence, federal officials announced charges against fifteen more people, accusing them of stealing more than ninety million additional dollars from social service programs in the state. I'm not going to read you fifteen names, and I want to be clear and careful. Every one of those people is charged, not convicted, and they are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the allegations sketched the shape of how this kind of thing works, and a few of them are worth pausing on. In one set of cases, prosecutors allege people inflated the number of meals served to children or padded the number of staff and hours at childcare centers to pull down more money. In what officials are calling the largest autism fraud scheme the Justice Department has ever charged, prosecutors alleged children were being falsely diagnosed with autism in order to unlock government money tied to their care.

14:10 Think about that for a second. The accusation is that a real child got a false, serious diagnosis attached to their name, not for their benefit, but as a billing instrument. And the single largest alleged fraud in this new wave isn't in the city at all. It's in rural southern Minnesota. In a case involving group homes for people with disabilities, prosecutors alleged the operators build more than twenty two million dollars in fraudulent claims to a Medicaid funded support program. An official described the disabled residents as having been used like lottery tickets to generate cash. And where did that money allegedly go? According to the indictment and aston Martin three porsches, three Teslas, five Rolex watches, expensive jewelry, real estate. The disabled people whose names were on the billing got used. The operators allegedly got a luxury car collection. There is one detail in this coverage I cannot leave out because it is the whole thing.

15:11 In miniature, officials described a case in which a man was supposed to be receiving around the clock care. He was neglected. He was later found dead, and the person running that alleged scheme kept right on billing the government as though care was being provided, including prosecutors say, submitting a claim for more than four hundred dollars for services that were never provided the day before the man died, billing for the care of a dying man you weren't caring for. That's where the road ends for this kind of greed, not in a spreadsheet in a room where a human being was left to die while somebody somewhere filed the paperwork to get paid for the help he never got. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. Amy Bach is going to spend what is very likely the rest of her working life in a federal prison, and the people newly charged will get their day in court like everyone is owed, but the children who were the excuse for all of it. The meals invented, the diagnoses faked, the care never delivered. They don't get those days back.

16:15 Someone has to say that out loud, so I will last story Golden Colorado. And before I tell you what a grown man is accused of doing, let me tell you about the kid he's accused of doing it too, because the kid is the reason this story matters. His name is Jack Howard. In September of twenty twenty four, he was seventeen years old, and on the day this happened, Jack wasn't doing anything that any of us didn't do at seventeen. His friend, a fifteen year old we'll just call Luke, wanted to do something special for his girlfriend for homecoming, a photo shoot something nine. So the two of them went out looking for the perfect backdrop, the way teenagers have looked for the perfect spot since the invention of the camera, and they found one a pretty late.

17:10 The catch was that the pretty lake sat next to private property. So here is the master criminal plan these two boys executed. They hopped a fence so they could go ask the homeowner for permission. That was the plan. Knock on the door, ask politely, can we please take some pictures here? They heard music coming from a barn, walked up, knocked, and when nobody answered, they turned around and went back to their car, which importantly was not even parked on the property. The prosecutor summed up the entirety of their crime spree in one line. This was the extent of their intrusion. They picked the wrong house, and they picked the wrong people. The man who owned that property is Brent Metz. He's forty years old, a former town council member, and according to prosecutors, while those two boys were knocking on a barn door looking for someone to ask permission from, Mets was watching the whole thing on surveillance cameras through an app on his phone.

18:06 Neither he nor his girlfriend was even home. His girlfriend called nine one one and told the dispatcher there were kids all over the place, and she assured the dispatcher that Mets would stay off the property until police arrived. That prosecutor say is not what happened. Instead, the prosecution told the jury Mets and his girlfriend decided to box the boys in to trap them to keep them from leaving, and Mets didn't just go to confront two teenagers in a parked car. He brought a nine millimeter handgun with a live round already in the chamber, ready to go. The prosecutor's phrase was blunt. He came in hot, and then a single shot was fired into the car and it hit Jack Howard in the face. Jack Howard survived being shot in the face. Let me say that.

18:53 Again, because it's the only mercy in this entire story. He lived. A seventeen year old took a bullet to the face for the crime of looking for a place to take homecoming photos, and he lived. Now. Brent Metz has pleaded not guilty, and his trial started this week. Opening statements were on Wednesday. So I'm gonna give you the defense's version in full because you deserve to hear it, and because the jury is the one that decides this, not me and not you. His attorney told the court that Mets' intent was not to assault these boys and not to menace them. The defense says that when Mets got out of his truck, he was moving the handgun into a hip holster, and that as he stepped down, his left foot, in the lawyer's words, didn't find the ground quite where he thought it would be, and that the gun went off quote without his attention and without his command, an accident, a stumble, a tragic misfire.

19:49 And here is the part of the defense that I find genuinely striking, and I mean that without sarcasm. The defense attorney stood up and conceded on the record that these teenagers had an innocent purpose, that their biggest mistake was minor trespassing his words, no big deal. That they were doing nothing wrong, he said, and I'm quoting him, that everyone in this courtroom will agree they did not deserve to be shot at. The defense is not arguing the boys had it coming. The defense is arguing the gun went off by itself. So that's the whole case right there. In the space between those two stories. The prosecution says a man watched two kids on his cameras, decided to trap them, walked up with a loaded gun with one in the chamber, and came in hot. The defense says a man tripped and a gun he was holding discharged on its own. According to the criminal complaint, one of the teams told police that right after the shot, Mets exclaimed, my gun went off. A jury is going to have to decide whether that's the sound of a horrified accident or the alibi forming in real time. I'm not going to tell you how that question comes out, because the trial is happening as we speak, and twelve people in Golden are going to answer it, not me.

21:05 But I'll tell you what I keep thinking about. Even if you believe every word of the defense, even if that gun truly went off by accident, it only went off because a man chose to walk up on two teenagers in a parked car who were not on his property, who had already left, while holding a loaded handgun with a round in the chamber. You don't get to that accident without first making a series of choices. And I gently point out the charges here are second degree assault and felony menacing, not attempted murder. Jack Howard took a bullet to the face, and we're going to let the people of Colorado wait exactly what that's worth. Jack Howard is alive, and I hope he's healing, and I hope the rest of his life is long and boring and full of better photographs than the ones he went looking for that day.

21:51 We'll follow the. Trial that's our show for a Friday ninth, twenty twenty six, Let's tie it off. In Los Angeles, Kenneth Awamasa. The assistant who knew Matthew Perry for thirty three years and was supposed to keep him alive, was sentenced to forty one months, the fifth and final defendant in a case that is now closed. In Minneapolis, Amy Bock got nearly forty two years for masterminding the Feeding our Future scheme, with fifteen more people newly charged and presumed innocent as that fight goes on. And in Golden Colorado, Brent Metz is standing trial right now over the shooting of seventeen year old Jack Howard, who survived a bullet to the face while scouting a spot for homecoming photos. Here's what I want from you before you go, and it's simple.

22:42 If something in today's show stuck with you, If you've got a take on whether love should count for anything when you're the one holding the needle, or what nearly forty two years says about stealing from kids, or whether a loaded gun and a stumble add up to an accident. I want to hear it. If you're listening on spot, drop a comment, right there on the episode I read them, and the best one shape how we cover these cases going forward, and wherever else you're listening, YouTube anywhere, leave us a rating and tell us what you think, and do me one favor. If this show is worth your time, it's worth a friends. Share this episode with one person who cares about this stuff the way you do. Send it to them right now.

23:23 Tell a friend. Word of mouth is the entire ballgame for a show like this, and you passing it along to one person does more than anything else you could possibly do for us. We'll be right back here next time with whatever the courts and the criminals hand us, and I promise you they'll hand us something. Until then, take care of the people who trust you. Don't be the cautionary tale. Do better. Daily Crime and Justice is a news and commentary program. The opinions expressed are those of the host. The following reflects the status of these cases as of recording. Kenneth Iwamasa pleaded guilty and was sentenced this week in connection with the twenty twenty three death of Matthew Perry.

24:07 The figure reported to us for that sentence is forty one months in prison and a ten thousand dollars fine with his sentencing. All five defendants charged in this case have now been sentenced. This matter is concluded at the trial level, and any future appeals would be reported separately. Amy Bach was convicted by a jury and has now been sentenced to a term reported as five hundred months roughly forty two years, with restitution exceeding two hundred and forty two million dollars. Her attorney has indicated an intent to appeal. The fifteen additional individuals reference in this segment, including the allegations involving falsified autism diagnoses, the group home billing case, and the neglected patient claim, have only been charged charges are accusations. Every one of those people is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty, and nothing in this this segment should be taken as a finding that they committed any crime. Brent Metz has pleaded not guilty and is on trial as of this recording. Opening statements have been delivered, but no verdict has been reached. The prosecution's account and the defense's account described here are competing arguments, not established facts, and mister mets is presumed innocent unless and until a jury finds otherwise, All reporting in this episode is drawn from court coverage and wire reporting, where a specific figure or quotation is later corrected by the official record.

25:33 The official record controls