pro-marijuana Pamela S. Davis Carroll Circuit Court Liberation Westminster Shopping Center
Pot suspect's shop raided
In her unabashedly pro-marijuana clothing and accessory store, Pamela S. Davis keeps a fishbowl filled with seeds, free for the asking.
Unfortunately for Ms. Davis, an undercover Carroll drug officer .. walked into the store at Westminster Shopping Center, grabbed a small handful out of the bowl and sent the seeds to the state police crime lab.
On Thursday, the crime lab reported that the seeds had sprouted into marijuana plants.
And that was enough to persuade a Carroll Circuit Court judge to sign a search warrant for Liberation, Ms. Davis' counter-culture outlet where she sells handmade imported clothing, acerbic anti-establishment buttons and T-shirts, and a full line of marijuana books, pamphlets and newsletters.
Yesterday, members of the Carroll County Narcotics Task Force raided the store, seizing "several pounds" of marijuana seeds, more than $1,000 in cash, business records and paraphernalia.
The raid came less than 24 hours before Ms. Davis' jury trial this morning in the so-called UPS case, where she faces a four-count indictment charging her with drug dealing out of her Westminster farm.
That case stems from a May 7 raid in which task force officers, disguised as UPS deliverymen, brought a package with 1.5 ounces of marijuana addressed to Terrapin Station, the Davis family farm.
When a woman at the farm signed for the package, the task force moved in, arresting Ms. Davis, two of her children and a woman living at the farm.
The task force recovered about half of the marijuana that they had delivered as well as about an ounce of pot found in a night stand.
Of the four people arrested, only Ms. Davis and her son David Kif Davis remain charged; charges against Sara Davis, who is Ms. Davis' daughter, and Claudia Roll, who lives at the farm, were dropped last summer.
Yesterday afternoon's raid of Liberation resulted in new possession and distribution charges against Ms. Davis, said Assistant State's Attorney Barton F. Walker III, who heads the task force. She was arrested without incident by task force officers at her farm yesterday afternoon.
Ms. Davis spent last night in the Carroll County Detention Center, where she was held without bail. A District Court commissioner denied her bail, and it wasn't clear whether she would be given a bail review in front of judge before or after her trial on the previous charges begins this morning.
As for the timing of the raid, Mr. Walker said it was "purely coincidence." He also indicated that he was prepared for today's trial, saying the raid "would have no effect" on the proceedings.
As he talked to reporters, task force officers rifled through boxes of clothing, filing cabinets full of financial records, books on marijuana and even the cash register, where one officer found nearly $1,000, most of it in $100 bills.
The raid began shortly before noon, when task force officers served the search warrant -- signed by Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. -- on 21-year-old Julie L. Buckland, a clerk at the store who lives with Ms. Davis and her children.
Ms. Buckland was detained by a county sheriff's deputy during the raid, but was not arrested or charged with any crime. And although a drug-sniffing dog alerted on Ms. Buckland's Honda Civic, officers found no drugs in the car.
Ms. Buckland said that she was told to expect something like this.
"We knew they wouldn't leave us alone, and it was only a matter of time," she said as task force officers rummaged around the shop.
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