Acting on an anonymous tip yesterday afternoon, city police arrested a 62-year-old local who they say was equipped with numerous guns, knives, handcuffs and a half-dozen bottles of hospital-grade fentanyl.
Officers got word of their suspect, 62-year-old Wendell Beard, around 4 p.m. They found him in his car in the 2200 block of Linden Avenue in Reservoir Hill.
“In plain view,” police said, were six packaged bottles of sprayable hospital-grade fentanyl, a drug that’s 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, according to the DEA. (For what it’s worth, police department spokesman Det. Donny Moses said in an email that hospital-grade “is a weak dosage” and “not very strong” compared to other forms of the drug.)
Also in the car, officers found an array of weapons and assorted supplies, including two 9mm semi-automatic handguns, a BB gun, four knives, a wooden club, two sets of handcuffs and a black face mask.
Beard was arrested and charged with handgun, deadly weapons and narcotics offenses, for which he exact list isn’t yet available in online court records. Police say he’s waiting to appear before a court commissioner.
Beard was arrested this past March on narcotics possession and manufacturing charges, and was charged with attempted burglary and second-degree assault stemming from multiple incidents in 2016. He was found not guilty of one set of attempted burglary offenses in October; prosecutors dropped another attempted burglary case from June 2016 and struck a plea deal for the assault case from May.
The fentanyl bust is the second of the week. Police on Tuesday busted a convenience store at 22nd and N. Charles streets and allegedly found large amounts of suspected fentanyl, WBAL-TV reported.
Fentanyl was responsible for nearly seven in 10 overdose deaths in Maryland in the first half of 2017.
