Sedalia police recently announced four arrests in two unrelated incidents of methamphetamine dealing. Kenneth Thomas Yocum, 53, of Kansas City, and Jeannie Marie Davidson, 46, of Centertown, were arrested at 12:48 p.m. Monday after officers with the Crime Resolution Unit conducted a traffic stop near the intersection of Clinton Road and Driftwood Drive for a license violation.
“With the new unit we're being more proactive,” Sgt. Kevin Klein said. “From not only trying to do more search warrants and focus on these nuisance houses, but also being out doing interdiction-style enforcement. We go out, make car stops, search cars and that happened to be one that Officer Brett Twenter and Detective Cherry were able to get a car stop on him and we ended up finding a good quantity of meth.”
The investigation led police to believing that Yocum and Davidson were delivering it to someone else in town. They arrested them and stopped that process.
The large amount of methamphetamine and other items indicative of drug sales located in the vehicle led to charges of first-degree trafficking for both occupants.
The second CRU arrests followed the service of a search warrant at 1012 W. Fourth St.
Holden B. Browning, 31, and Jacob C. Astor, 30, were arrested in the early morning raid.
“The search warrant was something we've been working on since the unit started about the first of August,” Sgt. Kevin Klein said Friday. “We were getting some complaints from neighbors in the area, and we’ve been focusing our attention on it and watching it, it took us about a month and a half to piece everything together.”
Police obtained a search warrant and found methamphetamine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, items and additional evidence to indicate the drugs were being distributed from the home.
“Which is consistent with the complaints of the activity that we were getting from people in the area,” Klein said. “We ultimately made our case against those two individuals, arrested them, took them to the jail where they were put on 24-hour holds.”
Charges of distribution of a controlled substance have been sent to the prosecutor’s office. Officers also posted that the house was in violation of the City Nuisance Ordinance. The newly enacted ordinance gives the property owner and the tenants 60 days to get rid of the problem, in this case the drug activity. Police are hopeful this nuisance ordinance and additional pressure from the Crime Resolution Unit will prevent some of the rampant meth abuse in Sedalia.
“Meth’s been a problem around here for years,” Klein said. “We just try and curb it the best we can. Doing the interdiction-style patrols like we do, and search warrants, it takes all the help we can get from the neighbors in the area to identify these places for us and give us information on what's going on, a lot of time that's what leads us to some of these houses.”
The new nuisance ordinance is a tool the City can employ to shutdown illegal businesses, police say they like it and many of the citizens like it as well.
“It's working out well, we're actually getting a lot of good feedback from, obviously, the folks in the neighborhood, but also the landlords a lot of times this gives them the fuel they need to go and get some of these people out of their houses that are causing problems,” Klein said. “It's basically designed just for these types of things where we've got a problem house in the neighborhood.
“We're trying to prevent these houses from becoming recurring problems,” he continued. “We go and serve a warrant, arrest the folks out of there and then serve the nuisance ordinance to hopefully try to prevent the activity from continuing.”
