By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
Police detained about a half dozen people when they served a search warrant yesterday morning in a Centralia trailer park, including one man who apparently swallowed large amount of methamphetamine and nearly died.
Centralia Police Department detective Sgt. Pat Fitzgerald said when the SWAT team and detectives arrived at the residence off the 1700 block of Harrison Avenue to look for evidence of a forged and counterfeit check operation, a 27-year-old man on the porch refused to give up and fought with the SWAT team, so they used a Taser gun.
The man was taken to the hospital to be checked out and began having convulsions, Fitzgerald said.
At Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, providers concluded he must have ingested drugs, and it was “touch and go for awhile” Fitzgerald said.
“The report we got from the hospital was it was more than anything they’d ever seen before,” he said.
Three individuals were arrested after the 8:30 a.m. visit to the trailer, including Erica D. McCleary, 33, of Centralia, for forgery and identity theft, according to police.
Police found identification and other personal information of numerous victims from the greater Centralia area and other items consistent with a suspected operation, according to Fitzgerald.
“We don’t know the number of victims yet,” Fitzgerald said this morning.
Also arrested was Ronald W. McNeal, 50, of Centralia, for possession of methamphetamine and April L. Busby, 34, of Rochester, for an unrelated outstanding bench warrant, police said. The others were released.
The search followed a lengthy investigation and turned up credit cards, social security numbers and other personal information police suspect was stolen in car prowls and from mailboxes.
“Anytime you get this kind of activity, you can (expect to) link it to a lot of petty crimes,” he said. “Most of the time, those things are related to drugs.”
McCleary and McNeal live at the residence just south of the fire station, and several people receive mail there, he said.
It’s the home of Fred Isaacson, a man known to law enforcement as “Blind Freddie” and yesterday marked the third time Centralia police have served search warrants there in the past year, according to Fitzgerald.
Late last summer, they arrested Isaacson there and in May of this year, police found Robbie Russell hiding inside a sofa in the trailer when his friends has removed some of the upholstery and stapled it back together with the wanted man inside, according to police.
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Read yesterday’s news story “News brief: Search at Centralia home turns up forged check operation, police say” for a few more details about yesterday’s raid here.
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter