Busted in cocaine sting, accused man walks free
A Waterloo-area man, busted at gunpoint in an elaborate drug sting two years ago outside a Windsor McDonald’s, walked out of a downtown court Wednesday a free man. “I’m innocent,” a smiling Joshua Isaac told a Star reporter as he exited a courtroom at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
In his written judgment, Justice Gregory Verbeem said there simply wasn’t enough concrete evidence linking the Waterloo region man to a crack cocaine-dealing operation busted up by the Windsor Police Service on Feb. 24, 2016. Tipped off by a confidential informant that a pair of Toronto area men were dealing crack cocaine out of a Howard Avenue motel — using local taxis to make deliveries — members of the Windsor police drugs and guns enforcement unit (DIGS) set up a “play” in which the pair was placed under surveillance and an undercover officer posed as a cocaine purchaser.
After some back-and-forth calls and texting, a late-afternoon rendezvous was arranged at the McDonald’s restaurant on Huron Church Road at College Avenue. The deal was for a $240 purchase of an 8-ball of crack cocaine, a common amount for a street purchase. When the deal looked to be completed, the DIGS team called in members of the emergency services unit, who arrested two male suspects at gunpoint in the back seat of a Vets Cab.
As a trial began last April for the two men known on the street as Shaggy and Mario, co-accused Mikel Stewart of Brampton decided to plead guilty.
He was sentenced in December to a five-month jail term for trafficking.
Stewart — like Isaac, 22 years old at the time of the arrests — was also placed on probation for 18 months, ordered to submit a blood sample for the police DNA databank and prohibited from owning any weapons for 10 years.
The cellphone conversations between the undercover cop and the dealer were traced to Stewart, and ownership evidence of a cellophane-wrapped cocaine rock found on the floor of the taxi’s rear passenger area was deemed circumstantial by the judge. The Crown had argued that there was “no possible innocent explanation” for Isaac’s presence or actions that day.
But Verbeem said there was reasonable doubt and the prosecution’s evidence, at most, simply showed that “Mr. Isaac was just there.”
(the evidence, at most, simply showed that) Mr. Isaac was just there.