A man walked into the bathroom of the Cumberland Farms on Central Street in Randolph on April 23 and locked the door. When he didn’t emerge after an unusually long period of time, employee William Brady went to check on him. Brady found the man lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious and unresponsive, and checked for a pulse. He found none. The man, 30-year-old Randolph resident Donald Farnham, had died of a fentanyl overdose.
According to a sworn affidavit from the Randolph Police Department, Tara Bent, 25, was arrested for selling Farnham the fatal dose of drugs. The affidavit said that a mutual acquaintance of Bent and Farnham’s gave police a recorded phone call between himself and Bent, in which Bent implicates herself. “I gave him four,” Bent allegedly said to him in the recording. “I told him to be careful.”
Bent pleaded not guilty in Windsor Superior Court on Tuesday to charges of selling narcotics. She wore a gray coat open over her shoulders, covering her handcuffs. She bounced her left knee up and down, and shifted her weight from foot to foot as her state-appointed attorney and the prosecution debated whether she was a flight risk.
The prosecution successfully argued that Bent, who has missed four court dates in Vermont and has a number of active bench warrants for her arrest in different states, was a flight risk. The court set her bail at $25,000.
Bent was charged with one felony count of sale of narcotics, carrying a maximum prison sentence of up to five years. She’s being held at the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield.
