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Warren police arrest three suburbanites, one Warren woman, on drug offenses
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Friday and Saturday evening produced several drug arrests in the city, with many of the people involved being suburbanites who reported having jobs.
In all three incidents, heroin was confiscated.
Warren Police Chief Eric Merkel said that doesn’t surprise him.
“We get them from all over,” he said. “We get a lot of commuter traffic.” He added that someone with a heroin addiction will travel wherever they have to to get the drug.
At 8:15 p.m. Friday, police made a traffic stop at Ward Street and Austin Avenue Northwest, discovering that the driver, Robert C. Jack, 31, of State Road in Champion, didn’t have a valid driver’s license because he had just gotten out of prison.
He had been sent to prison by a Trumbull County judge in March 2013 on a heroin-possession charge.
Jack admitted he had a bag of Xanax pills in his pocket, and police later found a bag in the center console containing heroin, four syringes, a burnt spoon and a bag of suspected oxycodone, reports say.
He was charged with heroin possession and taken to the county jail.
At 8:51 p.m. Saturday, police stopped a car at the intersection of Todd Avenue and Stiles Street Northwest and found that a back-seat passenger, Brandy L. Renicker, 27, of Dunstan Drive Northwest in the city, had several arrest warrants.
While Renicker stepped out of the car, a police officer saw her place something in the elastic of her pant leg, which police said they found to be six bindles of heroin.
She was charged with a variety of drug offenses.
According to reports, another passenger in the car told police that the driver, her boyfriend, Steven J. Williams, 46, of Maplewood Drive in Cortland, who said he worked at a local steel factory, had picked up Renicker to take her to get drugs.
With that information, police arrested Williams and charged him with permitting drug abuse, a misdemeanor.
Later at the county jail, Renicker asked, “Do you want this now?” and pulled a bag out of the crotch area of her pants.
Inside the bag was a cookie tin containing six used hypodermic syringes, police said.
At 10:35 p.m., police followed a car on North Park Avenue that was traveling 20 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone and watched it pull into a tavern parking lot.
The officer pulled into the tavern parking lot a while later and saw the two occupants move around as if they were trying to conceal something.
The officer smelled marijuana as he got close to the vehicle, according to reports, then found a bindle of heroin in the pocket of the passenger, Travis B. Morgan, 27, of South Turner Road in Austintown. Morgan later told jail officials he works for a door-repair company.
The driver of the car, a female, had a small amount of marijuana in her possession, but she was not charged.