A corrections officer at the Cumberland County Jail has been arrested and charged with dealing cocaine.
Davis Glazener, 22, of South Portland, was arraigned at the Cumberland County courthouse in Portland Wednesday afternoon on the felony charge and did not enter a plea during the hearing.
While Glazener was in court, Sheriff Kevin Joyce talked with the media at his office about the arrest.
Glazener has been a corrections officer for two years, Joyce said. There is no preliminary indication that the alleged drug trafficking is connected to his work at the jail, according to the sheriff.
“It appears he was living two lives,” Joyce said.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, the South Portland Police Department and the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency learned about the allegations Tuesday, according to an affidavit filed in the case.
An unnamed source told law enforcement agents that Glazener sells narcotics, and they had seen him with different types of drugs, including cocaine, large amounts of marijuana and molly, also known as MDMA or ecstacy. Glazener had also showed the source a cell phone app used for money transfers, saying, “the money is just rolling in.” He had also allegedly shown the source photos of drugs in a safe in “amounts only seen in movies,” the affidavit said.
At the request of a state DEA agent, the source texted Glazener, asking to buy “snow,” a street name for cocaine. They arranged for the source to pick up cocaine from Glazener’s mailbox and deliver a $220 payment later in the day. The source and the drug agent then retrieved a plastic bag with 4 grams of cocaine from the mailbox on Mussey Street in South Portland.
Police then executed a search warrant for the apartment. A record of the search states they seized 24.9 grams of cocaine, a black scale, 29 Gabapentin pills not in a prescription bottle, plastic packaging, a Glock 9mm firearm and ammunition. They also found marijuana and a suspected marijuana concentrate. Based on the amount of money the source arranged to pay for 4 grams of cocaine, the total value of the cocaine seized in the apartment would be roughly $1,370.
The affidavit states that the police arrested Glazener when he arrived at the meeting place to collect the payment from the source. In his vehicle, police also found seven 30-milligram Oxycontin pills. He refused to be interviewed by police, and he was taken first to the Cumberland County Jail and then to the York County Jail. His bail was set at $5,000 cash.
“We booked him here for a reason,” Joyce said. “Because I want to show our employees and the public that we can take care of business, and just because you’re an employee, you don’t get any free passes.
“Once he was booked and once we found out that he was not going to make bail, to not put the other corrections officers, his previous coworkers in a situation that is uncomfortable, and those situations are uncomfortable, we moved him to York County.”
Glazener does not have a criminal record, Joyce said. He is on administrative leave without pay. The sheriff’s office will complete an internal investigation when the criminal investigation is over. Joyce described Glazener as a good corrections officer and said he was “shocked” by what had happened.
“This is a case where you always scratch your head and say, ‘what else could we have done to keep an individual out of the profession that did what this individual did?’ ” the sheriff said. “The answer is – I don’t have an answer.”
The source told investigators that Glazener allowed a former inmate to drive his car even though his license was suspended. The drug agent who wrote the affidavit was familiar with the former inmate from previous investigations into cocaine dealing. The sheriff’s office said it is looking into that connection, but there is no evidence yet that any illegal activity was taking place while that inmate was at the jail.
More criminal charges are possible. The charge for unlawful trafficking in a schedule W drug is a Class B crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine. The next court date is a dispositional conference on Jan. 30.
Staff Writer Matt Byrne contributed to this report.
Megan Doyle can be contacted at 791-6327 or at:
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