Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Ex-WCU player charged in fatal heroin OD case
Cops: He delivered drugs that led to man’s death
WEST CHESTER » A Philadelphia man was ordered held on $500,000 cash bail Friday by a district court judge here on charges that he sold the heroin that led to a New York man’s overdose death in a borough apartment.
Benjamin Jason Mingledough, a former member of the West Chester University men’s basketball team, had been arrested previously and charged with drug possession and related counts after borough police set up a drug buy with him as part of the investigation into the death at the
Ramsgate Apartments in August. The victim was found dead on the floor of an apartment with drug paraphernalia scattered around his body.
Mingledough, 25, of Cedarbrook Avenue, Philadelphia, was arraigned on new charges of drug delivery resulting in death, a first-degree felony, by Magisterial District Judge Marian Thayer Vito, who set his bail after getting information about his current address and past criminal history. He was returned to Chester County Prison to await a preliminary hearing in October.
According to an affidavit filed in the case by West Chester Detective Stan Billie, police were called to apartment D44 at the Ramsgate complex on South Franklin Street at 9:48 a.m. on Aug. 4. A woman there said she found a friend who had come to visit her unconscious in a first-floor bathroom.
The woman said that her friend, identified as Richard James “R.J.” Pound, had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Pound was declared dead by EMTs at the scene. In investigating the death, Billie found a clear plastic baggie and a blue wax paper bag on the floor in the toilet, along with other drug paraphernalia. He also found a cell phone that belonged to the deceased.
The woman told Billie she had met Pound in a half-way house eight months before,
and that he was visiting her from New York, where he was from. She said that Pound had texted a man she knew as Ben the afternoon before, and that she believed that Ben had sold him some hashish. Ben was later identified through phone records as Mingledough.
Using Pound’s cell phone, Billie was able to see the text messages sent between him and Mingledough. Another detective began communicating with the suspect that day, asking to purchase more of the drug that he had sold Pound the day before. When Mingledough arrived at a location they had set, he was taken into custody by officers. He directed them to a stash of heroin in his car that he said was the same that he had sold to Pound the day prior.
At the time, police found Mingledough in possession of marijuana, Oxycontin, and crack cocaine. He was taken into custody and charged with possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, and held on bail.
An initial autopsy of Pound showed the presence of Fentanyl, a powerful additive to heroin that has been blamed for a number of overdose deaths by heroin users in the Philadelphia area recently, in his blood. A final report by the Chester County Coroner’s Office listed acute fentanyl intoxication as the cause of death.
It was not known how Mingledough and Pound had connected. Mingledough is a graduate of Archbishop Carroll High School in Radnor, who came to WCU as a basketball recruit in 2011. He was known as a “talented player with tremendous upside (who) has ability to play almost any position on the floor,” according to the school’s website. “(The) coaching staff feels he has a very bright future ahead of him.”
Pound, meanwhile, was 21 when he died, and had graduated from Pittsford Mendon High School in Monroe County, N.Y., outside Rochester, where he played football, hockey, and lacrosse. He attended John Carroll University and Monroe Community College.
In his obituary, he was called “a kind, generous, and loving soul who enjoyed the outdoors” who had recently hiked the Appalachian Trail.
Mingledough was represented at the arraignment by defense attorney Tracie Burns of Chester. The prosecution was led by Assistant District Attorney Daniel Hollander.