A list of seven people charged amid what Sarnia police said was a record area drug raid has been whittled down to one, who likely won’t face trial until the fall of 2024.
Officers searched six addresses in Sarnia and Point Edward Jan. 12-13, 2022, including multiple auto-body shops, police said. They seized more than $171,000 in illegal drugs, including 14 grams of fentanyl, 122 g of pure carfentanil – a potentially lethal drug used to make fentanyl powder – more than 265 g of cocaine, and nearly a kilogram of crystal methamphetamine.
“I think the biggest meth (seizure) we’ve ever gotten was about half a kilogram or so,” Const. Giovanni Sottosanti, a Sarnia police spokesperson, said at the time. “And then carfentanil – it’s usually just a few grams here and there.”
Armed with warrants, Sarnia police units searched two Phillip Street East auto-body shops and addresses on Richard, Wellington and Devine streets about 3 pm Jan. 12. Another auto-body shop on Kendall Street in Point Edward also was searched.
Seven Sarnia residents, aged 24 to 55, had been charged by February 2022. But only one still was facing charges Friday: Nathan Raaymakers, 41, who was charged with three counts of possessing drugs for trafficking, and single counts of possessing drugs and failing to comply with a release order.
A week-long trial was tentatively set for October 2024 in Sarnia’s Superior Court of Justice Friday. The case has been delayed in part because Raaymakers’ first lawyer, Frank Miller of Windsor, retired last year. London lawyer Aaron Prevost is now handling the defence.
Charges against five other people in the case were dropped by April 2022. Charges against Nicholas Bailey, 26, of Sarnia, were dropped last week after he was sentenced to nine years in prison in a separate drug-trafficking case.
Raaymakers, then 34, was sentenced in 2014 to serve 30 days in jail on weekends for his interaction with a Sarnia man, who died after a fight at a Wallaceburg bar in April 2010. Raaymakers, who lived in Mooretown at the time, was initially charged with assault causing bodily harm, then manslaughter, but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of simple assault after a trial was canceled by the Crown.
The decision to call off the trial upset the family of the deceased, Steven Switzer.