ifredregill@altoonamirror.com
Altoona police filed drug charges Friday against a state parolee after law enforcement members discovered several illicit substances, including crack, in the parolee’s Altoona home, court documents stated.
In January, the Altoona Police Department worked with agents from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office to serve Mark L. Ivory, 45, with a Cambria County warrant for drug delivery charges, according to court documents.
While Ivory was not listed under Blair County supervision, an agent received information that Ivory was living in Altoona, police reported.
On Jan. 13, Altoona police accompanied Attorney General’s Office agents to Ivory’s address, and upon contacting Ivory, officers immediately detected the odor of burnt marijuana, a criminal complaint stated.
Valcin
During two drug busts earlier this week, Altoona police seized nearly 10,000 packets of heroin with a combined street value of $170,000, an Altoona Police Department spokesman said.
Altoona police Sgt. Matt Plummer said Friday that Altoona police learned about a large shipment of illegal substances headed for Blair County on April 17.
Acting on information from confidential sources, police raided a location Sunday, where they discovered about $8,700 in cash and 74 bricks of suspected heroin, or about 3,700 individual packets, valued at about $70,000, Plummer said.
On Monday, Altoona police and Blair County Drug Task Force members executed a search warrant on a vehicle driven by Braddock resident Sir-Jihad Z. Valcin, 18, in connection with the previously seized heroin, police reported.
Silver
An alleged drug deal turned sour Wednesday near Prospect Park, resulting in an Altoona couple being charged for armed robbery, court documents stated.
Crystal Walls, 35, and Brandon Silver, 29, are facing numerous firearms- and theft-related charges after a woman told police they took her money, gave her fake methamphetamine and forced her out of their vehicle at gunpoint, according to court documents.
Silver allegedly communicated with the victim through Facebook about selling meth to her, and set up the exchange location at Prospect Park, police reported.
The victim waited in an alley near the park until she was picked up by Silver and Walls in a blue Pontiac.
McDonald
An Altoona man with a criminal history of using GPS technology to stalk people was arraigned Wednesday in a separate stalking case, court documents stated.
Altoona police charged Matthew J. McDonald, 46, on Wednesday with several crimes, including forgery, stalking and theft, after his ex-girlfriend reported she discovered a tracking device magnetically attached to the underside of her vehicle, according to court documents.
The victim told police she briefly dated McDonald in December and January, but after they broke up, McDonald allegedly continued to text her, saying he knew her exact location, police reported.
After reading an article about McDonald’s prior convictions, in which he used a Spytec tracking device to harass another woman in 2019, the victim looked under her car and discovered a Spytec tracking device, a criminal complaint stated.
ifredregill@altoonamirror.com
The days of lugging around bins brimming with paper files might soon be a thing of the past for the Blair County District Attorney’s Office, DA Pete Weeks said.
“When I became (the DA’s) first assistant in 2018, we had several hundred boxes of files in the office,” Weeks said. “We had them stored under people’s desks, lining the hallways and there was simply no more room to store them.”
A couple years ago, the office began an initiative to purchase a server, allowing the case files to be digitized and accessed by computer, Weeks said. While the system was well ahead of paper filings, he said it was far from optimized.