WASHINGTON — Multiple law enforcement agencies descended on two residences in the Orange County town of Washington early Friday morning.
Two people were arrested on federal charges — one accused of drug-dealing, the other of knowingly allowing drug dealing on his property.
By midday, police were trying to find two others who remained on the run. A massive air and land search appeared to be underway in the Washington area into the early afternoon, with police and federal agents swarming the small rural community.
Vermont State Police cruisers, a police dog from the Barre Town Police Department, a tactical vehicle and unmarked vehicles carrying law enforcement personnel patrolled Route 110, while a helicopter flew overhead.
Police at the scene would not comment about the search or its targets.
By 2 p.m., the police presence dwindled, and the helicopter no longer circled the town.
Court filings unsealed Friday said 15 guns and quantities of fentanyl and crack cocaine were seized at the two residences.
Nichole LeClair, 34, was charged with distribution of crack cocaine and fentanyl, while Christopher Emmons, 51, faces a charge that he “used and maintained a residence for the purpose of distributing fentanyl and cocaine,” according to court documents.
The charges stemmed from search warrants executed at 7 Linnea Lane, described as LeClair’s residence, and a home on Route 110 in Washington where Emmons lived, according to court filings.
Both LeClair and Emmons are scheduled for appearances Monday in federal court in Burlington.
Items seized at LeClair’s residence included about 40 “Ferrari” stamped bags of suspected fentanyl; about 130 “larger green bags” of suspected fentanyl; roughly five grams of suspected crack cocaine; and a semiautomatic pistol, according to court filings.
The raids followed a series of “controlled purchases” of illegal drugs by confidential informants working with authorities in March and April, according to court filings.
LeClair is already on conditions of release in two criminal cases brought in Washington and Orange counties, court records indicate. She had been charged with selling cocaine in Orange County, and with cocaine possession and possession of a “depressant, stimulant/narcotic” in Washington County, according to prosecutors.
Those charges are still pending, and she had been released on several conditions, including that she abide by a 24-hour curfew and that she not possess any regulated drugs.
Prosecutors, seeking to hold Emmons in custody, wrote that police seized illegal drugs and a collection of guns from his residence. They listed 14 firearms, including a sawed-off shotgun that prosecutors wrote “appears to be a firearm restricted by the 1934 National Firearms Act,” plus about 28 grams of suspected crack cocaine and 400 bags of suspected fentanyl.
In a press release issued Friday afternoon, federal prosecutors alleged that two other men, Justin Llano and Glendon Parrish-Cambell, had been dealing illegal drugs, including heroin, fentanyl and crack cocaine, from Emmons’ residence. Arrest warrants had been issued for both on drug-related charges; as late Friday afternoon, they remained at large.
On one occasion in March, according to the press release, a confidential informant tried to buy drugs at Emmons’ residence, but Emmons told the person that the “drug traffickers had left the residence because law enforcement was conducting traffic stops in the area.”
In a statement issued early Friday morning, state police said they were joined by members of three federal agencies — the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations — and two local police departments, Barre City and Montpelier, in the raids.
The operation was at least the second such coordinated effort to target drug trafficking in central Vermont in recent years. A 2018 investigation involving the same agencies in neighboring Washington County resulted in 25 arrests on charges of selling heroin and crack cocaine.
Last year, ATF agents arrested a Connecticut man at a park-and-ride in nearby Northfield. Federal prosecutors alleged he was planning to sell large amounts of crack cocaine and fentanyl.
