By Mike Gangloff
The Roanoke Times
The problem wasn’t just that Christopher Franklin Bond had a methamphetamine habit, a federal judge said Monday. It was that Bond drove his police cruiser and wore his uniform, badge and sidearm when he went to buy and smoke the drug. “You were arresting people doing the same thing you were doing,” U.S. District Court Judge James Turk chided the former Pulaski and Radford officer at a sentencing hearing in Roanoke. Bond, 33, pleaded guilty in July to conspiring to distribute more than 50 grams of meth.
On Monday, Turk imposed a six-year prison term, to be followed by four years of probation. Bond said he had used meth for about 10 years, along with marijuana and the prescription amphetamine Adderall and painkiller Lortab. He said he’d been overwhelmed by his addiction, so much so that he took to stopping at a meth dealer’s home on the way home from work.
“This situation has been grossly blown out of proportion due to the fact that I was a police officer,” Bond said from the witness stand. “Other than a police officer, I’m just a person who made a mistake.”
Special Agent William Cunningham of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives testified that Bond’s appearances in uniform panicked other meth users, until the dealer, who Bond had known for years, assured them he wasn’t there to bust them. Witnesses told investigators that Bond stopped in as many as a hundred times to buy and use meth, Cunningham said. Bond often stopped at another dealer’s home in the early morning, Cunningham said.
That dealer’s boyfriend would have to hide in a barn while the officer picked up drugs because Bond did not like him, the investigator said.
Bond said that while he often used drugs, there were only three or four times that he sold meth. In those instances, he took money from Kelly Porter, the dealer whose boyfriend he did not like, and bought drugs to take back to her so that she would let him smoke some, he said. Bond “certainly was dishonoring the badge and the trust that was placed in him,” said his attorney, Everett Shockley of Dublin. “But what he’s done was on a very small scale ... the circulation of these drugs among friends.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlene Day, who prosecuted the case, said Bond’s “arrogance and boldness” in going to dealers’ homes in uniform “sickens me as a member of the law enforcement community.” Bond said he worked overtime to conceal the financial cost of his drug use, and family members testified that they had known nothing about it. Since his arrest, Bond said, he has rededicated himself to his marriage and church.
“I think you’ve changed” since being arrested in June 2009, Turk told him.
Bond worked in Radford from early 2005 until 2006, then in Pulaski from 2007 until June 2009. While free on bail prior to sentencing, he lived in Carroll County and worked at a telemarketing call center.
On Monday, he hugged his wife and was led away by U.S. marshals. His six-year sentence was slightly above the 70-month low end of the range suggested by sentencing guidelines and recommended by prosecutors as part of his plea agreement. At a hearing later Monday, John Daniel Cantrell, 25, the meth user and dealer who’d hidden in the barn when Bond visited, also drew a six-year sentence.
In July, he and Porter pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute more than 500 grams of meth, a charge with a stiffer penalty than Bond’s offense. The lowest prison term recommended by Cantrell’s sentencing guidelines was nearly 12 years. But Day said Cantrell helped make the case against Bond and suggested the two men receive the same sentence. Turk agreed, and recommended both receive intensive drug rehabilitation that could knock a year off their sentences.
Porter has not yet been sentenced.
Copyright 2010 The Roanoke Times