Officers with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Portland police Special Reaction Team swarmed a house near Presumpscot Elementary School in East Deering and arrested a 29-year-old resident Tuesday on a charge of aggravated trafficking in crack cocaine.
Police in camouflage armed with assault-style semi-automatic rifles, along with uniformed officers also carrying long guns, surrounded the 2½-story green house at 592 Washington Ave. about 10 a.m. The department’s armored Peacekeeper was stationed at the front of the house, and a first-floor resident unrelated to the raid was kept behind it for safety.
An Army-green armored vehicle pulled into the driveway of the house, which is accessed from Illsley Street. Nearby residents were told to stay inside, and roads were blocked off for several blocks in each direction.
After questioning the three people who were home at the time, police arrested Kerwin Lamour and charged him with trafficking drugs within 1,000 feet of a school. Undercover agents had bought crack cocaine from Lamour over the past month, police said.
The raid was unrelated to a shooting that occurred about 10 hours earlier in the Old Port, in which one man was killed and another injured. However, since the people responsible for the shooting were still at large, neighbors were uneasy and wondered if there was some connection.
Rob Dyer said he was leaving his apartment across Illsley Street for coffee Tuesday morning.
“I heard yelling and screaming. I thought it was a fistfight,” he said. He saw heavily armored special reaction team members entering through a rear door. Then an officer told him to go back inside his apartment. Later, he saw them leading away two men who appeared to be under arrest.
Cmdr. Scott Pelletier, head of the MDEA in southern Maine, said at a news conference that police moved quickly because of the drug activity’s proximity to the school. He said the presence of heavy armor was a response to the histories of some people who they believed were inside.
Police seized packaging materials, two handguns and ammunition, as well as some cocaine and marijuana. Pelletier would not quantify the drug amounts.
Police anticipate additional arrests.
The house and yard, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence, was purchased by Isely and Haendel Lamour in 2004. It’s unclear what relationship they have to Kerwin Lamour.
At about 10:30 a.m., police were seen loading a man, apparently under arrest, into a police van.
Traffic resumed in the area about that time.
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