 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Drug dealer facing jail, deportation
Saturday, December 15, 2001 By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When the Mercer County Drug Task Force showed up at her house in Sharon last year, Natalie Elaine Garbutt threw her cocaine out the bedroom window and then hid in a closet. Neither move worked.
Detectives quickly found her. And after a search, they also found 75 grams of crack cocaine, two digital scales, drug paraphernalia and about $1,000 in cash.
Garbutt's career as a drug dealer and her eight years as a fugitive were over.
Now she's headed to prison and, eventually, back to her home country of Belize.
Senior U.S. District Judge Maurice Cohill on Thursday sentenced her to 12 years and seven months behind bars, a term Cohill said was justified in light of her criminal history.
"The law is tough," he said in pointing out Garbutt's prior drug convictions, "but it is rightfully tough."
It could have been even tougher. Cohill actually sentenced her at the low end of the federal sentencing guidelines.
Garbutt, 35, has a felony drug-trafficking conviction in New York and had been on the run since 1992 on trafficking charges in Rhode Island, where police conducting a traffic stop found marijuana and crack cocaine stashed among her children's clothes in her suitcase.
After she serves her federal prison term, she will be deported by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Unlike most federal drug defendants, Garbutt elected to go to trial instead of pleading guilty. In September, a jury convicted her of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute.
The case began last year, when a confidential informant told a detective from the task force that a man named "Papa Dread" was selling cocaine out of a "fortress" at 581 Spruce Ave., a two-story house near an elementary school where Garbutt lived with Percival Higgins and two children.
According to a search warrant affidavit filed by an agent from the state attorney general's office, Higgins is "Papa Dread," and the informant had bought cocaine from him at the house in June 2000.
With the information from the informant, agents searched through the trash left outside the house and found drug paraphernalia and some cocaine powder on three occasions in July and August 2000. They also noted that Percival and Garbutt kept two Rottweilers to protect the drug operation.
On the evening of Aug. 31, the day of the last "trash pull," the drug task force served a warrant on the house issued by a local magistrate. As the detectives announced their presence and started to go inside, agents conducting surveillance outside saw Garbutt toss crack cocaine out the bedroom window. That cocaine, in addition to the cocaine taken from inside the house, totaled 75 grams.
Authorities decided to prosecute Garbutt in federal court because the penalties for drug-trafficking are generally harsher there than in state court.
After her arrest, her two children were placed in foster care.
Higgins, who was not home during the raid, has not been charged. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti said the investigation, which also involves the FBI, is continuing.
|
||||||||
