Just as the New Year's Eve ball in Times Square was dropping on television, Henrico County police were knocking on the door.
The response from inside the house among a swarm of underage drinkers was predictable: "It's the cops!"
For four hours Monday, testifying under grants of immunity, teenagers who rolled into a million-dollar western Henrico County home spoke of open drinking, open drug use, "pumpin'" music and, finally, panic when police officers surrounded the house in the 200 block of Quarter Mill Lane off River Road.
"I hid in the library," one teen testified, as her mother looked on inside a Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court courtroom Monday. Some ran for the woods or hid in the pantry, and another was pulled from beneath a car in the garage.
As many as a dozen police officers responded and surrounded the home after receiving a fight-in-progress call; after a short-lived effort to flee, some of the teenagers opened the doors to police.
Police found underage partygoers from area private schools clearly intoxicated, and the officers testified that the house reeked of marijuana smoke. The adult in charge, the teens testified, was nowhere in sight before police arrived, ensconced in her bedroom, where she tended to vacuuming duties.
But when that adult, Susan Lambert Hoback-Tweardy, emerged in a bathrobe looking "unkempt," according to one of the teens, she sidled up to her 17-year-old son, whose birthday falls on New Year's Eve, and said in the earshot of police, "I'm in trouble now." There was no evidence that the mother of five, who is estranged from her investor-husband, provided the alcohol or marijuana.
Most of the youths — there were about 25 in all — tested positive for alcohol but were never charged. And on Monday, their testimony, as well as Hoback-Tweardy's hourslong disappearance to a far end of the home New Year's Eve, resulted in 16 convictions of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for the 44-year-old woman.
Christopher Bain, Hoback-Tweardy's lawyer, said his client is considering an appeal. But for now, she faces 15 days in the Henrico jail beginning a week from this Friday.
Judge N. Kendall Newsom sentenced Hoback-Tweardy to 1,170 days in jail but suspended all but 15 days. And he ordered her to attend substance-abuse schooling, even though there was no evidence she was impaired.
When the police entered the premises, the most startling discovery was of Hoback-Tweardy's 15-year-old son, who was discovered passed out in a shower with the water running.
"At that point, I wasn't even sure that he was actually still alive," an officer testified about his reaction to finding the youth.
Hoback-Tweardy did not testify, but Bain said his client has been under the strain of a difficult custody fight and is raising two older sons with histories of behavioral problems whose father died at an early age. She also is responsible for three young children with her second but now-estranged husband, including a child with special needs, Bain said.
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Alice V. Sheridan, though, argued that given the two older sons' past problems, that it was New Year's Eve and that Hoback-Tweardy clearly knew her sons were expecting at least two guests that night, the defendant was negligent in not providing a safe environment.
Instead, Sheridan said, the woman's hourslong isolation guaranteed to the teenagers "there were going to be no consequences," no matter what they did.
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