THUNDER BAY — City police are reporting a second major drug bust in as many weeks after officers seized nearly half a million dollars in drugs, guns, and cash at two local residences.
Thunder Bay police officers executed warrants at homes on Simpson and College streets on Wednesday evening, finding drugs they believe to be fentanyl, cocaine, and Xanax and oxycodone pills.
The Thunder Bay Police Service pegged the total street value of those substances at around $350,000, while they also seized cash totalling over $103,000.
Officers seized one handgun in each home, along with a prohibited extended magazine, in what Det.-Insp. Jeremy Pearson called a concerning sign of the escalation of violence surrounding the drug trade during a Thursday press conference.
“The Thunder Bay Police Service continues to be concerned by the proliferation of not only controlled drugs in the community… but also by the increasingly common accompaniment of those with firearms,” he said.
The arrest of five suspects in connection with the seizures, including two from Thunder Bay and three from Southern Ontario, unfolded without incident, however.
The busts of the two alleged trafficking operations, which police said were interconnected, came about half an hour apart in a “carefully planned” operation starting around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Pearson described the busts as part of a larger, long-running investigation led by the TBPS Intelligence Unit into the local drug trade.
The seizure would have been seen as remarkable only years ago, police suggested, but now ranks as “notable, but not unusual," Pearson said.
“This amount of money, this amount of cocaine and fentanyl, and the fact there were loaded firearms – it’s rather a sad commentary that that is in fact is now commonplace."
Still, Pearson expects the bust to take a noticeable, if temporary, bite out of the local drug market.
“This is a significant impact on drug traffickers themselves, and this will have an impact in the community. It is a sizeable loss of drugs, of money, and of course firearms off the street. So there is a disruption element there.”
Just the night before, as the bust was occurring, acting police chief Dan Taddeo told residents at a public meeting the force’s drug seizures, while commendable, will have a limited impact without more government action to expand addictions treatment, social housing.
“We will continue to target traffickers, we will continue to investigate and put before the courts what we believe are strong cases for prosecution,” said Pearson. “The other side of that is addressing the profit that’s attached to these substances, and that gets into addressing the need, all the social circumstances that combine to create this dependence and create this vulnerability so people can be taken advantage of.”
Police named the suspects as Tesean Alvarez, 28, of Brampton; Nicholas Burnett, 18, and Mohammad Siddiqui, 18, both of Oakville; and Dwight Hanson, 49, and Anastasia Karhunen, 24, both of Thunder Bay.
All face multiple counts of possession of illicit drugs for the purpose of trafficking, careless use and possession of a prohibited firearm.
The suspects were set to appear in court on Thursday, police said.
The latest bust follows another made last week on Leith Street, where police reported seizing drugs including crack cocaine, cocaine, and fentanyl with an estimated value of $460,000.
Police believe Wednesdays’ seizure is “completely unrelated” to that previous one, as well as last week’s shootout at Spence Court that police have tied to the drug trade.
“It’s a source of concern that we have so many groups operating within the community and at some volume,” Pearson said.
