Robber turned heroin dealer back in prison

WEST CHESTER » The math adds up.

Sixteen is 41 percent of 39. Which means that when James Leroy Leonard turns that age in 2025, he will likely have spent more than one-third of his life in a prison cell.

“I pray for you, sir,” Common Pleas Judge Patrick Carmody told Leonard on Tuesday in reaffirming his sentence of nine to 18 years in state prison for three counts of selling heroin and cocaine in an undercover sting operation, some of which was laced with the deadly additive fentanyl. “But this is a very serious crime.”

Leonard, now 30, of Downingtown, was arrested by Westtown-

East Goshen (WEGO) police almost a year ago to the day after he was identified as the supplier of a drug dealer that had been targeted by area police for selling drugs while working as a cook at a West Goshen bar. But before that, Leonard had been named as an accomplice in a string of armed robberies of convenience stores and a fast food restaurant in northern Chester County and western Berks and Lancaster counties.

For those crimes, he was sentenced to 7 ½ to 15 years in state prison. According to Carmody, who presided over Leonard’s trial on the possession with intent to deliver trial in March, almost as soon as Leonard was released fro prison on the robbery charges, he “started dealing heroin.”

Leonard, a slight man with a bushy beard, is appealing his conviction, complaining that his attorney was ineffective in winning a not guilty verdict. The evidence in his trial showed that police had found bags of heroin in a patrol car that Leonard had been in briefly the night of his arrest; the drugs were not found directly on his person.

He had initially asked Carmody to formally reconsider his sentence of nine to 18 years, but because he had also filed a separate motion for a new trial, Carmody said he was forced to set that request aside. Carmody indicated, however, that he was unlikely to change his mind about how long he wanted Leonard to spend in prison. “Selling heroin with fentanyl in it … is just a very serious offense,” the judge said.

Leonard’s criminal history dates back to December 2002, when he and three other men committed a series of armed robberies.

On Dec. 20, 2002 a clerk at the Turkey Hill store on Horseshoe Pike in Honey Brook Borough reported that the store had been robbed by an unidentified man with a handgun shortly before midnight. The robber got away with more than $7,000 in cash after tying the clerk up with zip ties.

Shortly thereafter, the manager at a McDonald’s restaurant in Caernarvon, Berks County, reported that a man had knocked on the drive-thru window and when she answered, had pointed a gun at her. She dropped to the floor, and he shot her, wounding her in the right arm. The same day, two men robbed another Turkey Hill, tying the clerk up with duct tape and leaving her in a bathroom. Finally, during an attempted robbery on Dec. 22, 2002, Leonard and others were apprehended in Salisbury, Lancaster County.

Leonard was not formally charged until 2005, after one of the other men involved implicated him in the crimes during a court proceeding. He pleaded guilty to two counts of robbery and was sentenced by Judge Thomas Gavin to 7 ½ to 15 years.

In the heroin case for which Carmody sentenced him, Leonard got caught up in an investigation run by the WEGO police department in June 2016 into the drug trafficking activities of another man who worked as a cook at a restaurant in the Parkway Shopping Center on South High Street in West Goshen. Detective Lt. William Cahill coordinated a multi-department stake out, and was able to see suspicious activity involving the man, Quincye Bannister, and people who would meet him in a parking area behind the restaurant.

A confidential informant had arranged to meet Bannister to buy heroin and marijuana from Bannister. Around 9 p.m. on June 23, the police watched as Bannister met with men in two cars that had arrived at the parking area together. When the informant made his buy, police rushed in and took all three men into custody; Leonard was one of the suspects.

One of the men told police in an interview that Leonard was his source for heroin, and that he had set up a meeting between Leonard and Bannister so the latter could buy heroin from Leonard.

Leonard, who told Cahill at the scene that he had nothing to do with the drug sales that had taken place, was taken from the shopping center to the WEGO police station. Later, the officer who had transported him informed Cahill that when he was checking his patrol car he found a cloth bag on the rear floor where Leonard had been sitting. Inside, police found several bags of suspected heroin and cocaine, for which they charged Leonard with possessing.

Leonard was arrested June 24 and has been in Chester County Prison since.