Naman Shrestha
When a PTA mom named Kelli Peters becomes the subject of revenge of a well-to-do attorney couple, her life becomes a living nightmare. Starting with something trivial, the humiliation of Kelli aggravated to a serious police report, exactly a year after the attorneys’ son was not supervised properly after school by the PTA mom. The episode titled ‘Revenge of the PTA Mom’ of Sundance TV’s ‘True Crime Story: Smugshot’ sheds light on the case in detail through interviews with Kelli Peters herself, staff members at the school, and officials involved in the investigation.
Kelli Peters Was Framed in a Drug Case
In 2010, Kelli Peters was the president of the PTA at the Plaza Vista Elementary School in Irvine. Responsible for after-school activities, she was a parent volunteer who used to ensure that the students were reconciled with their respective parents after school. On February 17, 2010, a 6-year-old boy was left behind by mistake and he had to wait behind the locked back door before the tennis coach of the school walked him to the front desk. He was the son of the wealthy attorneys — Jill and Kent Easter.
Jill thought that her son was upset over something and had been crying. When she inquired Kelli why he was left behind, the latter simply explained that he might have been slow to lineup and she did not notice that he was missing. Taking the word “slow” the wrong way, Jill got offended and then began the vengeful campaign against Kelli. The following day, Jill wrote a formal letter of complaint against Kelli and handed it to the principal of Plaza Vista Elementary School, wanting her removed from the school effective immediately. She also began defaming her right outside of the school by falsely claiming that she allegedly left her son unsupervised on purpose, and spreading the rumors.
The school looked into the matter and found Kelli innocent, after which the attorney couple took her to court. This lawsuit cost her thousands of dollars, considering how prominent Jill and Kent Easter were in the industry. A year after the incident that started it all, on February 16, 2011, the police received an anonymous call around 1:15 pm that informed them about a rash driver at the Plaza Vista Elementary School. The individual on the phone claimed to be a concerned parent, named Vijay Chandrasekhar, of a child in the school. He said that he suspected Kelli was the driver so he checked out her car himself and found “a large bag of marijuana” in the backseat.
When some officers visited the school to check out Kelli’s car, they found a large bag of marijuana, a bag of Percocet, and a bag of Vicodin. As the police placed the drugs on top of their car for everyone to see, Kelli denied that they were hers and begged them to put them out of sight as she did not want her daughter to see. After that, they went to her residence for further search but could not find any evidence that tied her to the huge amount of drugs they had found in her car. Given the history between her and the Easters, she suspected that Jill and Kent might have framed her and informed the police about the same.
Since the investigators found zero evidence against Kelli, they launched an investigation into the drug planting instead. As their first course of action, they traced the call from Vijay Chandrasekhar to a hotel business center in Newport Beach, California. Upon checking out the surveillance footage of the day when the call was made, they saw Kent Easter walking into the hotel around the same time, which made the Easters the primary suspects. Moreover, Easters’ DNA was found on the drugs found in Kelli’s car. What acted like the final nail in the coffin was the fact that their phones pinged a tower near Kelli’s house in the early hours of February 16, 2011, when the drugs were reportedly planted.
As the police dug deeper into the marriage of Jill and Kent, they discovered that Jill had been having an affair with a fireman named Sean for about two and a half years. When they reached out to him, he was surprisingly cooperative and even wore a wire to get her to confess to the crime. In light of all these pieces of evidence, Jill and Kent Easter were arrested for conspiring to plant drugs in Kelli’s car and tricking the authorities into falsely apprehending Kelli. Although they got out on bail quickly, their mugshots were circulating across the nation. Several years later, in August 2016, Kelli Peters co-wrote a book with Riley J. Ford about the entire case — ”I’ll Get You!’ Drugs, Lies, and the Terrorizing of a PTA Mom.’
While Jill Goes by a Different Name Today, Kent Easter Maintains a Low Profile
Following the charges against them, both Jill and Kent Easter lost their law licenses. While Jill was permanently disbarred, Kent was suspended for some time and had the option to continue his legal practice. Jill ended up pleading guilty and was given a sentence of 120 days in late October 2013. On the other hand, Kent pleaded not guilty, resulting in a hung jury. In his retrial, Kent’s defense painted him as a helpless husband who did not have any backbone, especially in front of his wife Jill. But the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to 180 days in prison.
Ever since then, the Easters have been released, soon after which they reportedly got divorced. After the entire debacle, in 2016, Jill was featured in an episode of ‘Dr. Phill,’ where she hesitantly talked about the case. Meanwhile, in 2021, Kent Easter appeared in an episode of ‘Jeopardy.’ Although she is a self-published author of a book titled ‘Holding House’ which she wrote under the alias of Ava Bjork, she hasn’t released any more books after that.
Moreover, Jill reportedly changed her name multiple times, but she goes by the name of Ava Everheart and works as a consultant in Orange County, California. She is also hugely active on Amazon and shares her reviews about different kinds of products. When it comes to Kent Easter’s whereabouts as of now, he is understandably laying low and leading a life away from the prying eyes of the media.
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