Spat leads to arrest of alleged drug dealers

Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003 | 11:26 a.m.

A pair of alleged drug dealers made the mistake of pulling into the parking lot of a Henderson junior high school to argue last week and that led to their arrests as well as the confiscation of $8,400 worth of illegal narcotics and an apparent customer list, Clark County School District Police said Wednesday.

School Police spokesman Officer Darnell Couthen said the pair, a man and a woman, were bickering loudly over money in their car while parked at Burkholder Middle School, 355 W. Van Wagenen Street, Friday morning.

In addition to drugs, School Police Patrol Officers David Platt and Michael Thomas found $900 in the front seat of the car, a scale for weighing drugs and a list that could lead to more arrests.

"The ledger contained customer names and illicit contacts," Couthen said, noting there was no evidence to indicate that students at the school had purchased drugs from the pair.

"We plan to share the ledger with other law enforcement agencies for further investigations," Couthen said.

"Most of our drug arrest are small in nature," he said. "It is quite rare for us to confiscate this much drugs and a ledger."

The confiscated drugs that are being held in the school police evidence vault are:

Because police do not want to tip off the people whose names are in the ledger, they are not immediately releasing the names of the arrested individuals. Couthen would say only that they are a 31-year-old man and a 42-year-old woman, both transients from Las Vegas.

They are being held in the Clark County Detention Center on drug trafficking charges, he said.

While school police and administrators do not believe the pair were selling to school children, they noted that it was troubling because the arrest occurred at 10:50 a.m. when school was in session and that some of the drugs were found in plain sight of the arresting officers.

"They (the drug suspects) have no connection to this school," Burkholder Principal Dave Erbach said. "From what we have learned, they apparently pulled into our parking lot just to have a domestic dispute, and it was a loud one that attracted a lot of attention.

"Our dean contacted the school police who were on campus at the time writing a citation. Anytime you can take these people and their drugs off the streets it is great for the community."

Couthen said: "Even if they were not directly selling to kids, the presence of our officers at this campus got those drugs off the streets and prevented them from possibly ending up in the hands of kids."

Police found small packaged amounts of the various drugs in several parts of the automobile, which also has been impounded as evidence, Couthen said.