Philadelphia man arrested for alleged heroin possession

During car search, trooper finds heroin stashed inside box of cookies

WEST CHESTER » What the trooper who stopped the errant motorist on the Pennsylvania Turnpike last week found was certainly not vanilla.

Instead, what he discovered was more than 800 bags of suspected heroin.

Arrested was driver Christopher J. Pickard, a Philadelphia man on parole for drug trafficking and apparently recently released from prison in Centre County. He was charged with possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, and false identification to law enforcement.

Pickard, 29, was arraigned by Magisterial District Judge Marian Thayer Vito of West Chester and held on $400,000 cash bail. He is currently incarcerated at Chester County Prison awaiting a preliminary hearing on the charges.

According to the criminal complaint filed in the case, Trooper Thomas Fleisher was patrolling the turnpike in Charlestown around 3 p.m. Thursday when he spotted a Chevrolet Impala traveling westbound that he said was following the car ahead of him at too close a distance. He pulled the car over and approached the passenger side.

Fleisher wrote that he asked the driver for identification, and the man told him his name was James Pickard Jr. When the trooper asked the driver if he could search the vehicle, however, the driver refused. Fleisher then called for assistance, in the form of a state police K-9 officer trained in drug detection. When the K-9 unit arrived, the dog alerted his handler to the presence of controlled substances in the car.

When Fleisher opened the car’s trunk, he found inside it a black backpack. Opening it, he recovered a vanilla wafers box, he wrote in the complaint. Inside the box he found 427 white glassine bags of suspected heroin, all stamped “I’m Apache,” plus an additional 206 bags that also contained suspected heroin, but which were unstamped.

In a gray backpack on the car’s rear seat were another 170 blue glassine bags of suspected heroin stamped, “Power,” and two hypodermic needles. Under the right front seat was a wallet with a Pennsylvania ID card showing the name Christopher J. Pickard.

Pickard, the driver, was detained and taken to the state police barracks at King of Prussia for processing.

Court records show that Pickard was convicted of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance in Centre County in June 2016 and sentenced to 11 1/2 to 23 months in county prison. He was released on June 6.

In his arrest affidavit, Fleisher does not mention whether there were any cookies in the vanilla wafers box.