Judge to rule on legality of search
The search resulted in Uniontown police filing charges of possession and possession with intent to deliver marijuana against Michael R. Hickenbottom Sr., 35. Hickenbottom is the father of Michael Ellerbe, 12, who was shot and killed almost six years ago by a state police trooper. The boy was fleeing from police in Uniontown’s East End neighborhood.
Earlier this year, Hickenbottom won a multimillion-dollar verdict against the police involved.
Officer James J. Williams testified Monday that about a month before he searched Hickenbottom last year and found marijuana, he did a query through the state Department of Transportation and found out Hickenbottom had no driver’s license. When he saw Hickenbottom pull into a gas station on Connellsville Street around 1:30 p.m. Feb. 7, 2007, Williams said he and probation officer John Warman approached Hickenbottom, who acknowledged not having a license.
Based on that violation of the law – driving with a suspended license – Williams testified that he patted down Hickenbottom. The man told Williams that he had marijuana on him, and Williams testified that he then contacted city police to search Hickenbottom’s home on Lenox Street.
There, Williams testified that Hickenbottom showed police a shopping bag with nine individual plastic bags of marijuana inside.
Police also located another smaller bag of marijuana during a subsequent search of Hickenbottom’s car and found that Hickenbottom had about $1,300 in cash.
Hickenbottom’s attorney, Samuel Davis, asked Williams if police found scales or “owe sheets,” which list money owed to drug dealers.
Williams testified that one of the nine bags of marijuana weighed 52 grams – just less than two ounces. The other eight bags, and the marijuana found on Hickenbottom and in his car, weighed about 23 grams.
Davis argued that Williams and Warman had no reason to search Hickenbottom at the gas station because they did not see him commit a crime other than driving without a license. To search Hickenbottom, Davis said the officers needed reasonable suspicion.
“The probation officers overstepped their boundaries and the Uniontown Police Department would’ve needed a search warrant to conduct a search of his residence,” Davis said, arguing that Judge Gerald R. Solomon should suppress the evidence against Hickenbottom because there was no cause to search him.
Assistant District Attorney Jack R. Heneks Jr. contended that Hickenbottom’s violation of the law was enough reason to search him, and noted that Hickenbottom willingly admitted to Williams that he had marijuana on him.
Davis also argued that Solomon should dismiss the possession with the intent to deliver drugs charge, claiming there was no evidence Hickenbottom was going to distribute the marijuana.
State police Cpl. Dennis Ulery testified that in his experience the way the marijuana was packaged, combined with the one larger bag, was indicative of an intent to sell the drug.
Davis suggested that Hickenbottom could have purchased the individual bags from a dealer who might have had only smaller bags. The attorney said that Hickenbottom could have tried to get a “bargain,” for example buying eight smaller bags for the price of six.
Heneks discounted that.
“He might have bought it at some drug dealer bargain sale, but I doubt it,” Heneks said.
He asked Solomon to consider Ulery’s expert testimony.