Dad beats child endangerment case with plea deal
TRENTON » The city man who got slapped with two counts of child endangerment after his 5-year-old son brought drugs twice to school has beaten the case by pleading guilty to another active matter.
Self-confessed drug dealer Maurice Leonard Jr., 30, of Humboldt Street, admits he possessed a controlled dangerous substance and distributed it last November in a Trenton school zone.
Leonard, a convicted robber who has been rearrested multiple times since his release from state prison, had been jailed without bail after police busted him on new drug charges Nov. 1, 2017. He resolved that case with a Jan. 8 plea bargain and got sentenced Feb. 23 to 364 days of county incarceration to be followed by three years of probation, according to court records.
Leonard made headlines in September 2016 after his then-5-year-old son, a student at the International Academy of Trenton Charter School, took 30 packets of heroin to school in a lunch box. Leonard and his then-girlfriend Turia Justice, who is not the boy’s mother, were both arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child. Then a teacher at the kid’s school found a small bag containing crack cocaine inside his folder on Oct. 24, 2016.
A grand jury handed up an indictment on Feb. 15, 2017, charging Leonard with two counts of seconddegree child endangerment and Justice with one count of third-degree child endangerment. Justice, 28, of Trenton, got accepted into the Pre-Trial Intervention diversionary program last May, and prosecutors dismissed Leonard’s child endangerment charges last Friday after he got sentenced in his unrelated drug case, records show.
Leonard in October 2006 pleaded guilty to being complicit in a deadly November 2003 robbery that ended with triggerman Jaquan Austin shooting and killing 44-year-old Jose Arias on the streets of Trenton. Leonard was sentenced to seven years of incarceration in that case and since then has been re-arrested multiple times for various offenses and has struggled with substance abuse in recent years, according to court records.
Hamilton Police arrested Leonard and two co-defendants in connection with a November 2012 armed robbery of an East State Street business. Co-defendants Divine Thompson, 20, and Mcghore E. Jean, 29, have both pleaded guilty in the case and find themselves currently incarcerated in state prison. The state ultimately dismissed the 15-count indictment against Leonard on Oct. 30, 2017, six months after a mistrial. Leonard did not rob the Hamilton food mart, according to Jean’s and Thompson’s testimony.
Trenton Police in December 2015 arrested Leonard on allegations he unlawfully possessed a handgun but a jury of his peers exonerated him Oct. 10, 2017, finding him not guilty.
Trenton Police hammered Leonard with a litany of drug charges last March, but a Superior Court judge allowed Leonard to be released from jail pretrial following that arrest. Prosecutors then downgraded the charges and remanded the matter to Trenton Municipal Court, where Leonard was found guilty and fined $400 for a disorderly persons offense, court records show.
Leonard’s rap sheet now includes two New Jersey Superior Court convictions and two municipal court convictions. The convicted felon during his latest proceedings was represented by defense attorney Peter Abatemarco.
At Leonard’s sentencing hearing last Friday for his November 2017 drug case, Abatemarco said his client “sees this as an opportunity to get on with his life” by pleading guilty and that “we suggest that this will be an opportunity to show that he can do well on probation and not return to court for any further violations of the law.”
Mercer County Superior Court Judge Darlene Pereksta said Leonard is a father prohibited from having contact with one of his five kids, an apparent reference to the child who brought drugs to school on two separate occasions in 2016. With Leonard being a self-confessed drug dealer previously convicted for robbery, Pereksta wanted to send a clear message to the Trenton dad.
“There needs to be a consequence for your actions,” the judge told Leonard during the Feb. 23 sentencing hearing. “I think if you are sincere, as Mr. Abatemarco said, in trying to turn things around you would respond well to probationary treatment. That’s going to be up to you as to how you look at probation. If you look at it as a support system to keep you kind of on the right path, you will do well. If you do not, then you’ll be back here facing a violation.”
The prosecution and defense mutually reached a pre-indictment plea deal calling for Leonard to serve three years of probation upon serving 364 days at the Mercer County Correction Center on a third-degree drug charge.
“I think that is a just sentence,” Pereksta said from the bench last Friday, “and I will sentence you in accordance with that plea agreement.”
Pereksta also imposed the following conditions of probation: Leonard must submit to random urine monitoring, he must obtain or try to obtain and maintain full-time employment, and he must comply with all conditions set by the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency, formerly known as DYFS.
Leonard has been awarded 88 days of jail credit for being incarcerated on pretrial detention. After serving his 364-day jail sentence, Leonard must report to probation within 48 hours and could be resentenced to a maximum of five years in state prison if he violates probation.
In terms of the state’s rationale for dismissing Leonard’s child endangerment charges, “The defendant has now pled guilty and has been sentenced on other charges,” Mercer County Assistant Prosecutor Daniel Matos said at Leonard’s sentencing hearing. “No useful purpose will be served by further prosecution of the charges.”
The Trentonian news staff as a whole has earned a New Jersey Press Association third-place award in the First Amendment — Art Weissman Memorial Award category for the newspaper’s 2017 coverage regarding its legal battle against the state Attorney General’s Office surrounding stories about the Division of Child Protection and Permanency’s failure to protect the 5-yearold boy who took heroin to school.
The New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has also recognized The Trentonian with special honors for the newspaper’s courage in challenging the state’s unconstitutional censorship tactics and winning.