Editor’s note — This is part two of a three-part series. To read the conclusion, see Wednesday’s print edition or visit www.darnews.com.
VAN BUREN — Six-year-old Mason Passmore was still looking for the cupcakes that she’d been told about.
Being a child is like being in a world populated by giants. A world of kneecaps and roadblocks, always having to carefully navigate around the lumbering, mobile tree trunks that surround you.
Her face was turned up in hopes of catching someone’s eye to ask about the cupcakes.
She’d probably seen the box full of delicious treats, but it wasn’t open. Perhaps Mason thought since this was a special day for her mother and father, 37-year-old Lacy Petrekovich and 47-year old Jayson Passmore, and since the cupcakes were for them, she should probably wait until it was opened by someone else.
Her eyes met someone who was sitting in the visitor’s section. Since they were more or less at eye level, it was easier to approach them and ask the burning question, “I heard there were cupcakes here.”
That person pointed in the general direction of the cupcakes and she nodded in thanks, ready to make her move. But out of the corner of her eye, she saw her dad.
An observer could see the love between them as their eyes locked and she pushed her way through the tiny door dividing the two sections of the courthouse. One side for the public, the other for those awaiting judgment.
But on this day, the swinging door did what it was designed to do, provide free movement between the two sections, with no restrictions.
Everyone was assembled on this day for only one reason — to celebrate the accomplishments of two brave people.
Mason ran to the outstretched arms of her father and they embraced, cupcakes forgotten, if only for a few precious moments, as a father and a daughter hugged in the room full of giants.
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Spring 2019
Undercover officer makes ‘jackpot’ find
When you go to court, it’s not really a good idea to take drugs with you in the car drive there. But the couple decided to party with some friends after the court date and didn’t want to drive back home. So, they brought a supply with them.
About to enter the courthouse — the old Pincushion building that was serving as a temporary home for the Carter County Courthouse after the flood in May of 2017 — Lacy noticed the metal detectors. Knowing Jayson carried a pocketknife, she asked if he had it on him. He did and he headed back to the car to drop it in the car.
As he reached into his pocket to pull out the knife, he also grabbed a couple of capsules. He dropped them all in the door panel of the car. What he didn’t know was that an undercover officer out of Sedalia, Missouri, witnessed this. The officer saw the capsules and decided to investigate.
Lacy was inside the courthouse when she was told Jayson was in handcuffs. She walked out to see her car being searched and heard one of the officers exclaim “Jackpot!”
Not a good thing to hear when you are already up on drug charges.
Lacy and Jayson were arrested and taken to the temporary Carter County Sheriff’s Office next to the courthouse.
It was nothing more than a mobile trailer, the kind used on job sites. Jayson was interrogated first while Lacy sat outside the room.
Jayson was trying to take the brunt of the heat.
He was not exactly being cooperative because in his words, “I had the drug dealer mentality” and his only thought and motive in the conversation were to keep Lacey out of jail.
Trailers of the sort that they were being interviewed in are not what you would call palatial. Lacey could hear every word going on in the other room.
“I’m listening to all of this and they ask him, ‘Why don’t you just let us know where you’re getting it from,’ and he said, ‘Well, is it going to let my wife go home?’ And the guy said ‘No,’ so Jayson said, ‘Come up with a better incentive,’ “Lacy recalled. “I was in the hallway thinking, stop talking.”
What they didn’t know was that a search warrant was being obtained while they were in custody. It would allow authorities to search their home and find items that would lead to additional charges of forgery and possession of stolen property.
The couple secured their release but it didn’t take long for them to find themselves back in jail. Hours actually.
Incarceration musical chairs
The new charges from the search of the home were the first reason they were hauled back in.
They were able to bond out again since they had received their income tax refund.
And the game of incarceration musical chairs began.
They would bond out; the music would stop, and the state would sit them back down in jail, several times, until the money ran out. Lacy and Jayson were looking at 55 days in jail.
Locked up together in Shannon County, it wasn’t so bad. They talked every day and were able to see each other.
Until Lacy got sent away to Wayne County that is. For the first time since this all began, they were apart.
They sat in their respective jail cells pondering their fate.
Jayson wasn’t all that worried until they started talking about federal charges, which means more jail time and mandatory sentence lengths.
Lacey was convinced she was going to get hammered due to her Arizona record.
April 2021
A changed couple, working to leave the past behind
When you meet Lacy and Jayson now, it’s hard to imagine them sitting in jail on drug charges.
Lacy is outgoing and vivacious, with a laugh that when you hear it, you laugh right along. You may not have even heard the joke and have no idea what’s supposed to be so funny. But you laugh anyway because her laugh is so infectious and full of joy.
Her smile is a comfortable welcoming smile, yet it is tinged with regret.
You see it first in her eyes as she talks about her past.
The saying “it is what it is” gets used an awful lot these days.
But when it’s a part of your life that you have to come to grips with to get better, regret is inevitable.
Lacy’s smile will evaporate, and she becomes quiet and stares off in the distance with a gaze that seems to see a million miles away. You know she is going through it all over again in her memory and feeling the disappointment and regret over all those who she feels she let down.
“I just tried to keep myself so high that I didn’t have to mess with it,” she recalled. “I knew it was bad eight, nine, 10 months before it was really bad, but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t hurt bad enough yet. Which is something that is really hard to admit out loud.”
When you remind her, she has come so far, made so many positive changes and has a bright future with a chance to help others, she will smile again. But behind that smile, the regret seems to linger, like someone who’s overstayed their welcome, and you just can’t make them leave.
Jayson is all business.
The man likes to work, and through most of the madness he held a full-time job framing houses. He played his part in what they went through and realizes the choices they made were destructive.
“It’s like trying to put a fire out with gasoline,” he said. “I would wait for the train wreck so much I would sabotage everything and then I would run toward the train on the tracks.
“When I got hit by the train it was never my fault.”
Instead, it was why were they doing that to him, or acting like that.
“I was in self-destruct mode, and I couldn’t understand that it wasn’t everyone else’s fault,” Jayson said.
‘Nothing good is ever easy’
Jayson is very analytical, substantiated by the timeline he created when Lacey suggested they get some drugs on that weekend so long ago.
The Jayson you see now is the same man, but with a higher purpose.
The same approach to work utilized for a better purpose, dedicated to sobriety and most of all his family. Lacy and Jayson are not married but he constantly refers to her as his wife. The love the two feel for each other is apparent when you see them together. As is the commitment to living a different kind of life.
Everyone deserves a lifeline, a second chance.
There is an old Japanese proverb that says “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
That quote is a favorite of someone in Carter County who became very essential in Lacy and Jayson’s future.
You see, he had the lifeline, and he held one end of the rope.
All they had to do was grab on and commit.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but another favorite saying of Carter County Associate Judge Steven Lynxwiler is “Nothing good is ever easy.”