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Trial on drug charges nears end
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Brandi L. Watson, 27, of Warren, took the stand to defend herself Thursday against charges that she is a “major drug offender” who helped bring $120,000 worth of heroin from Detroit to Warren on Jan. 15, 2010.
Watson and Frederick D. Johnson, 40, with whom she lived until his arrest, both face charges in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court that could land them in prison for 40 years or more if convicted during their trial, which resumes today.
Both face charges of cocaine and heroin possession, tampering with evidence and specifications indicating that each is a major drug offender because of the volume of drugs involved. The specification can add up to 10 years to a prison sentence.
Watson, who went by the name Brandi Purbaugh at the time of her arrest, testified that she snorted cocaine in the passenger seat of her car Jan. 15, 2010, and that shortly afterward, police started chasing the car, so the driver fled.
The driver, whom Watson identified as a drug dealer named Ken, led police on a high-speed chase that included a short trip through a yard on Porter Street and ended on Belvedere Street Southeast, where Watson and the man fled on foot.
Police did not apprehend the two people in the car.
Watson said the driver put cocaine in her lap during the drive and ordered her to throw it out of the car, which she did, she said, because she was afraid Ken would “smack” her if she didn’t.
But Watson said she never saw the heroin police later recovered, and she doesn’t know where the drugs came from, even though investigators said Watson told them later that she and Johnson brought the cocaine and heroin to Warren from Detroit.
Investigators from the Trumbull Ashtabula Law Enforcement Task Force, who began following Watson’s vehicle as part of an ongoing drug investigation, believe the driver was Johnson.
Johnson did not testify at the trial.
Police arrested Watson about three hours after the chase at a home on Atlantic Street. Johnson turned himself in to police a couple of days later.
Watson testified Thursday that she used cocaine about 200 times between April 2009 and Jan. 15, 2010, but she never went to Detroit to buy the drugs.
While being questioned by her attorney, Jeff Limbian, Watson said she was still high on cocaine about 3 a.m., when TAG detective Fred Raines and federal agent Matt Harrell interviewed her at the Trumbull County jail.
Upon cross examination by Chris Becker, assistant Trumbull County prosecutor, however, Watson admitted that she was not high by that point, because the drug would have worn off by about 1 a.m.
When asked about testimony from Raines and Harrell earlier in the trial that Watson had told them Jan. 15, 2010, the exact amount of cocaine and heroin that police found and that she and Johnson had been buying drugs from Detroit and selling it for a year, Watson said the officers were lying.
“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Watson said when Becker asked why they would lie.
Closing arguments will be given at 10 a.m. today in the courtroom of Judge Peter Kontos.