Boise man injected meth into teen who overdosed. Now he’s headed back to prison.

A now 31-year-old Boise man must serve 10 more years in prison for distributing the methamphetamine that is believed to have played a part in killing 19-year-old Charles Peyton Chambers.

Tommy Basco pleaded guilty in May in federal court to distributing methamphetamine, a charge that was amended down from distributing methamphetamine resulting in a death. By pleading guilty to the lesser charge, Basco avoided a mandatory 20-year minimum sentence.

Chief U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill sentenced Basco on Monday to 10 additional years in prison, plus three years of supervised released.

Basco’s charges stem from October 2016, when Chambers apparently overdosed on heroin. Basco is accused of putting Chambers in a bathtub of cold water and injecting him with meth, instead of seeking medical help, in an alleged effort to revive him. His ultimate cause of death was a meth overdose.

The reason the court agreed to the plea agreement involving the lesser drug distribution charge is because investigation found that Chambers may have used more methamphetamine that day that came from a source other than Basco.

Authorities previously said that Basco showed Chambers’ body to others in an apparent attempt to intimidate them, allowed Chambers’ personal items to be ransacked and then staged the death at another location. Police claim Basco moved the body to Chambers’ car and parked it in a gravel lot at Hyatt Hidden Lakes Reserve, along Maple Grove Road. Chambers was found by a passerby who saw the car.

Winmill’s sentence comes after Basco was charged and sentenced in 2017 for failure to report a death in court.

Fourth District Judge Nancy Baskin sentenced Basco in 2017 in Ada County to 10 years in prison with five years fixed. He is serving the state prison sentence at Idaho State Correctional Center in Kuna.

Chambers was a 2015 Boise High School graduate. His mother, father and brother spoke Monday in court, offering victim impact statements.

His mother, Allison Chambers, said her son had admitted to being a drug addict and planned to move to Salt Lake City in an attempt to get clean. However, he did stop at Basco’s on his way out of Boise for what she described as “one last high.”

Chambers’ mother spoke at length about the grief she struggles with and how Basco’s actions after her son had died, including staging the death and stealing possessions, were “nothing short of calculated and deplorable.”

She said she felt that Basco had shown no remorse and that Basco still didn’t understand what she had lost due to his actions.

Idaho Assistant U.S. Attorney Bryce Ellsworth said in court that Basco made several decisions on the day he found Chambers unconscious in his house, and none of them included calling 911 or taking him to a hospital.

Defense attorney Mark Ackley spoke at length about his client’s own problems with drug addiction, saying his comments were not meant to offend Chambers’ family.

“I do suspect (Chambers) was a different individual when free of substances than when using,” Ackley said while looking at the Chambers family. “Tommy Basco also is a different individual when he is using substances.”

Ackley outlined how his client grew up in a drug-infested, abusive environment and turned to drugs to deal with those untreated problems. Because of those problems, Ackley said his client does not express emotion and vulnerability easily, but that Basco does, indeed, feel remorse. Because they didn’t want to cause any more unintended pain to Chambers’ family, Ackley said his client was waiving his right to speak in court.

“He failed to report a death, which was wrong and callous,” Ackley said. “He was charged, convicted and sentenced.”

But Ackley said Monday that the question remains about whether Basco caused the death, and his experts say that Basco did not directly cause Chambers’ death.

“Using methamphetamine is horribly reckless,” Ackley said. “Peyton Chambers did not commit suicide, and Tommy Basco did not commit homicide.”

Ackley acknowledged that Basco “was extraordinarily selfish that night” in not reporting the death, but that his client didn’t cause the death. The defense attorney said he was willing to open the files to the victim’s family, if they wanted, to see witness statements and medical records that were previously closed.

Before handing down his sentence, Judge Winmill said the plea agreement was “imperfect,” but evidence showed Chambers may have taken meth that day from sources other than just Basco. Because of that, a charge of distributing methamphetamine resulting in death would not have been prosecutable. The plea agreement was an alternative that still set a 10-year prison sentence agreement, rather than just a year or two for distributing meth, he said.

Winmill said he’s spent his entire adult life in court and knew that it was not an ideal agreement for the victim’s family.

“I can’t offer any words of solace that mean anything, except to indicate in our imperfect system, this is as good as our system can do,” Winmill said.

This story was originally published September 24, 2018 at 1:34 PM.