May 31, 2018

Contact: Sheriff Armando Fontoura (973) 621-4105

Newark – Seven suspects, including a wheelchair bound man in his 70’s and a female septuagenarian, were arrested Wednesday afternoon on multiple drug charges by Essex County sheriff’s detectives in four simultaneous raids on two federally funded housing complexes in Newark.

“In executing a search warrant yesterday at a second floor apartment, located at 15 Pennington Street, our officers walked in on four male suspects, sitting around a glass-topped coffee table and wearing plastic gloves, as they were in the process of packaging heroin for street distribution,” Sheriff Armando Fontoura said.

Recovered at the scene were 22 grams of uncut morphine, 524 heroin-filled glassine envelopes, an additional 17 grams of unpackaged heroin, 84 grams of ‘crack’ cocaine, $801 in alleged drug sale proceeds and a wide assortment of drug packaging and processing materials.

Taken into custody were Kenneth McCarthy, 45, Sherif Kirksey, 40 Steven Richardson, 59, all of Newark, and Anibal Rodriquez, 53, of Carteret.

Three other search warrants were executed at apartments at 1060 Broad Street.

In a fourth floor apartment, wheelchair-bound Weldon Grady, 73, was arrested when the sheriff’s narcotics officers discovered 10 vials of ‘crack’ cocaine, 27 Suboxone films and 9 oxycodone tablets on top of the suspect’s bedroom dresser.

A third floor apartment was also raided.  Here, the sheriff’s detectives seized two plastic bags containing heroin, three plastic bags containing cocaine, 9 oxycodone tablets and drug packaging materials in the living room of Katherine Stokes, 76.

A search warrant for the seventh floor apartment of Charlie Flowers, 64, was also executed and it yielded a metal cannister, containing 67 grams of ‘crack’ cocaine and drug processing materials.  Flowers was also found to have six vials of ‘crack’ cocaine secreted in his waistband.

“Our national opioid crisis is real,” Sheriff Fontoura noted.  “Senior citizens involved in the narcotics trafficking of heroin, morphine and oxycodone is a reflection that this scourge knows no limits.”

The street value of the narcotics seized in the four raids is estimated to be in excel of $30,000.

McCarthy, Kirksey, Richardson and Rodriguez were each charged with 15 criminal counts, including possession of CDS, possession of CDS with intent to distribute, possession with intent to distribute within 1000 feet of Sanford Charter School, conspiracy to violate New Jersey’s narcotics laws and maintaining a narcotics production facility.

Grady was charged with six criminal counts, including possession and possession of CDS with intent to distribute.

Stokes was charged with 13 criminal counts, including possession and possession of CDS with intent to distribute.

Flowers was charged with 5 criminal counts, including possession and possession of CDS with intent to distribute.