NORTHAMPTON — A 43-year-old Westfield man was sentenced to five to seven years in state prison on Tuesday along with two years of probation after he sold a pill laced with a powerful synthetic opiate that was responsible for the death of 57-year-old Susan “Peach” Goldenberg of South Hadley in 2024.
Standing before Hampshire Superior Court Judge Deepika Shukla alongside his attorney Elizabeth Halloran, Christopher Halla sat while he, and the rest of the courtroom listened as Goldenberg’s daughter Carly Goldenberg, provided her victim’s impact statement, discussing how she suffers from insomnia, panic attacks and post-traumatic stress after the loss of her mother.
Carly Goldenberg noted that her father died of cancer 10 months prior to her mother’s death and that she will soon graduate college without either parent to watch her accept her diploma.
“Because of the careless and preventable act I was then left with no parents at 19, I carried the trauma of finding my mother in our home, the same home my parents raised me in, lying in bed, blue and purple, dead with foam coming out of her mouth. That image is something I will never be able to erase from my mind,” Carly Goldenberg said. “I will always go to bed with that image plaguing my thoughts and I wake up trying to forget it. That is something I will suffer the consequences of for the rest of my life.”
Halla, who last week was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence when a jury determined over a four-day trial that by selling counterfeit oxycodone pills, which contained an illicit and powerful synthetic opioid called metonitazene, Halla acted recklessly and with a wanton disregard for Goldenberg’s life. Metonitazene is a synthetic opioid believed to be more potent than fentanyl.
The defendant’s tampering with evidence charge came when Halla called his ex-girlfriend after he was arrested for selling the counterfeit oxycodone pills to State Police Trooper Katherine Newell, who was working undercover.
During the phone call, which was played as evidence in court last Monday, Halla notified his ex-girlfriend that he had been arrested, asked her to flush the remainder of the pills down a toilet and advised her not to take any of them.
While the commonwealth, represented by Assistant District Attorney Aidan Lanciani and First Northwestern District Attorney Steven Gagne recommended Halla be sentenced to six to eight years in state prison with two years of consecutive time incarcerated for tampering with evidence, the defense called for Halla to receive a sentence of four-to-five years in state prison.
Shukla, explaining that over the last few years the state’s manslaughter sentences have ranged from two-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years, said that sentencing was not easy in this case. She thanked Carly Goldenberg for testifying and made it clear that the sentence should not be seen as the level of value assigned to her mother’s life.
“The task I have today in imposing a sentence is not an attempt to assign a number to Susan Goldenberg’s life and to Carly Goldenberg and her family… no amount of prison time is going to bring her back,” Shukla said. “It’s clear she was a special person to the people in her life. Now, nevertheless, I have the difficult task to impose a sentence that’s fair and accomplishes the goals of sentencing.”
A written statement released by the DA’s office in 2024 stated that Halla’s case represented the first manslaughter charge brought in connection with a fatal drug overdose in the Northwestern District since the Supreme Judicial Court’s Carrillo decision in 2019, when the court held that selling heroin to someone is not reckless or dangerous enough to support a manslaughter conviction.
In that case, a University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate student was convicted for selling a fatal dose of heroin to an undergraduate student.
