From the Courts: Jailhouse Drugs

As reported by the Herald's By STEVE BRUCE

Police have filed new charges against a sheriff’s deputy and a woman accused of giving him a package of drugs to be smuggled into a Dartmouth jail last October.

In an information sworn Tuesday by a Halifax Regional Police detective, Tyrone Cornell David is charged with breach of trust, accepting a bribe and conspiring with Mary Kathleen Kierans to traffic in hashish, cocaine and Valium.

The pair won’t be arraigned on these latest charges until Nov. 15, when their preliminary inquiry on a slew of earlier drug charges is to get underway in Dartmouth provincial court.

The two-day inquiry will determine if there is sufficient evidence to proceed to Nova Scotia Supreme Court, where Mr. David and Ms. Kierans have chosen a jury trial.

Police allegedly saw a young woman pass an envelope containing drugs to a uniformed sheriff’s deputy in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant on Pleasant Street in Dartmouth shortly before 9 a.m. on Oct. 9.

Mr. David, 40, was arrested a few minutes later as he arrived for work at the Dartmouth courthouse, also on Pleasant Street. He’s charged with 12 counts of possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking.

Police picked up Ms. Kierans, 22, on nearby Chadwick Street. She faces three counts of trafficking.

Court documents indicate that Mr. David, of St. Margarets Bay Road in Lakeside, was allegedly caught with cocaine, marijuana, hashish, ecstasy, morphine, Dilaudid, hydromorphone, Valium and amphetamines.

Ms. Kierans, of Bedford Hills Road in Bedford, is accused of trafficking in marijuana, hash and Valium.

Police believe the drugs were to be smuggled into the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Dartmouth through the holding cells at the courthouse.

Ms. Kierans’s boyfriend, well-known local crime figure Jimmy Melvin Jr., was in custody at the Dartmouth jail at the time.

Mr. David is on paid leave from his job pending the outcome of the charges. He and Ms. Kierans are free on bail, with orders not to communicate with each other.