A 46-year-old Woodbury woman is accused of buying alcohol for minors to drink during parties at her home and looking the other way when they did drugs.
The arrest warrant for Christine Nessel said officers have visited her home since 2008 to investigate reports of underage drinking parties, loud music, drug sales and criminal mischief and the incident that led to the charges happened early on the morning of Thursday, March 24.
"At first it was weird and cool because Christine was a parent allowing kids to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana but then it got scary," one juvenile witness told police during the investigation.
Three children live at Nessel’s home and police found four to six teens outside when they responded to the house just after 3 a.m. on March 24. Nessel told police that it was a sleepover and no one was drinking alcohol, police said. According to the calendar for Region 14 Schools, school was not in session on March 24 of March 25.
Later in the day, the guardian of a 15-year-old boy called police with concerns that he’d been drinking and taking pills.
When police spoke with the teen, he told them that he took anti-anxiety drugs and drank beer while Nessel was at the house, according to the arrest warrant.
On April 1, police went to Nonnewaug High School to investigate drugs and officers found texts from Nessel on a teen’s phone asking if there was anything illegal in her room that needed to be cleaned up before the Department of Children and Families showed up. One text also informed the student that Nessel removed the alcoholic beverage Four Loko, according to the arrest warrant.
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Police spoke with several witnesses and one told police that minors drank at the house and did drugs, including Xanax, marijuana, Adderall, LSD, Konopin and muscle relaxers and Nessel doesn’t do or say anything about it, according to the arrest warrant.
Another teen told officers that teens had given Nessel money and a list of alcoholic beverages they wanted and she went out and bought the items for them.
In another interview, a teen said beer was present at a party at Nessel’s house, everyone was playing beer pong and smoking cigarettes, some teens were sniffing Adderall and it was weird that she was sharing a drink and making small talk.
When police arrived around 3:30 a.m. because someone threw up over the deck, the officers weren’t allowed in the house and everyone inside turned off the lights and whispered while Nessel spoke with police, the teen said, according to the arrest warrant application.
Other teens said Nessel bought children alcohol and didn’t say anything when she saw children smoking marijuana, while another said the minors sometimes took Nessel’s prescription drugs.
Nessel has been charged with one count of risk of injury to a minor and five counts of permitting a monor to possess alcohol.
She was released on a $5,000 bond.
The police report says police contacted her, but she did not want to speak with police.
NBC Connecticut went to Nessel’s home and no one there and no attorney is listed for her on the online docket.
