A Massachusetts District Court judge last week dismissed a case against Rida Kori, a former Burlington school board member who was charged with drug trafficking last year.
Kori, 25, was arrested in Holyoke, Massachusetts, during a traffic stop in September 2024 and was charged with trafficking roughly 86 grams of suspected heroin and fentanyl, according to previous court records.
But last week, a Massachusetts District Court Judge William P. Hadley dismissed the case after Kori’s attorney filed a motion to suppress evidence.
The attorney, Kedar Ismail, argued that police searched Kori’s car without a warrant and without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, and he asked the judge to suppress the evidence in the case as “fruits of the poisonous tree,” according to a court transcript.
In a phone interview, Ismail called the traffic stop “pretextual,” and in court transcripts said the officers involved in the traffic stop were “using what they needed in order to fit their narrative to get the reasonable suspicion, to get the probable cause.”
Prosecutors during a court hearing in August pushed back, and said officers with the Massachusetts State Police had made previous surveillance observations of Kori in a “high-crime area,” according to court transcripts.
Members of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Springfield, Massachusetts, were alerted to Kori when they spotted his vehicle during a separate narcotics investigation in Enfield, Connecticut, in July 2024, according to a previous affidavit written by Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael DeCaro.
Investigators later tracked Kori’s vehicle via electronic surveillance and noted several trips into Massachusetts and Connecticut, the affidavit read.
Ismail did not dispute that drugs were found in Kori’s car, but told the judge during court hearings that the search was “an egregious violation of his Fourth Amendment right and his Article 14 protections.”
A Burlington High School graduate, Kori ran unopposed for the Ward 1 seat on the school board on Town Meeting Day in 2024. He attended Central Connecticut State to play Division 1 soccer, and previously worked as an assistant varsity soccer coach at Burlington High School.
He submitted his resignation shortly after his arrest last year. Kori, in an email, referred comment to his attorney but said the court “dropped my case and I was vindicated.”
