Cops: Duo Took "Selfie" With Pal Who Died Of OD

AUGUST 28--After their friend apparently died of a drug overdose, two Missouri residents posed for a “selfie” with the corpse, an image that one of them later uploaded to Facebook after dumping the body on a rural road, according to police.

As detailed in a probable cause affidavit, Chelsie Berry, 24, told cops that she was driving around with Dennis “Nathan” Meyer last week when he began acting “crazy” after injecting himself with the pain killer Dilaudid.

Claiming that she was “nervous” around the unstable Meyer, Berry (seen at right) said that she called one of his friends, Jared Prier, whom she had met the prior evening. Prier, 28, picked up Berry at a McDonald’s and they “hung out in the parking lot for a little bit.” Meyer, Berry said, was “passed out.”

After driving to a convenience store, Prier told Berry that “he believed that Nathan had quit breathing.” Berry told cops that she “checked Nathan and did not think he was breathing either.”

Berry claimed that she and Prier were “scared to call for an ambulance and did not want to take Nathan to a hospital because she and Jared were high on meth and Xanax and thought they would get in trouble.”

So the duo drove to a back road and “dragged Nathan from the front seat to the back seat because they did not want to look at him any longer and also the fact that he began to smell bad.”

However, before they moved the body, Berry and Prier posed for a “selfie” with the 30-year-old Meyer, said Newton County Sheriff Ken Copeland. A tipster subsequently alerted investigators to the photo after Berry uploaded it to Facebook, said Copeland, who added that the image showed Berry, Prier, and the “passed out” Meyer in the front seat of Meyer’s Nissan Pathfinder.

Berry told police that she and Prier (pictured above) drove around “looking for a place to dump the body.” They eventually settled on a rural driveway and “pushed the body out of the vehicle onto the ground.” An autopsy determined that Meyer’s “breathing would have been faint and it would have taken a while for Nathan to die.”

Berry and Prier were charged yesterday with abandonment of a corpse.

According to investigators, Meyer and Prier have been linked to the Joplin Honkies street gang. Earlier this month, Meyer posted to Facebook a series of photos showing him posing with Prier. The images were captioned, “Me and my homie prier... I'd ride with him with or without a patch....” (3 pages)