KEARNY –
On Friday, Jan. 27, Kearny police received a 9 p.m. report of a 16-year-old town girl having collapsed on the 500 block of Belgrove Drive.
Officer Esteban Gonzalez arrived to find the teen lying unconscious in a grassy area near the curb, with three female friends standing near her.
Police said the friends told the officer that she may have ingested a drug-laced “snack.” North Arlington EMS — under its mutual-aid agreement with Kearny — responded and took the victim to Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville for treatment.
According to police, further interviews indicated that the “snack” — cakes or cookies — had been consumed on Forest St. near Kearny High School and at some point these items were discarded in the street. The KPD searched that area on foot and, on Saturday morning, a bag of sugar cookies was found along a curb by Officer Richard Poplaski.
As of this writing, The Observer had not learned the nature of the drug in the cookies, but a law enforcement source told us, “It had to be more potent than cannabis, since it took Narcan to get her [the victim] to regain consciousness.”
Narcan is the trade name of Naloxone, a life-saving opioid-overdose-reversal drug being used increasingly by first responders across the country.
Following the discovery of the cookies, the KPD Vice Unit took up the case, conducted more interviews and developed a suspect, identified as Demetri Canabe, 18, of Kearny, police said. He was arrested at 6 p.m., Jan. 28, on River Road in North Arlington and was charged with distribution of a CDS, distribution within 1,000 feet of a school and possession of drug paraphernalia.
He was then released on his own recognizance — with a source speculating that the ROR could likely be attributed to New Jersey’s new bail-reform law.
[Editor’s note: That, in our opinion, is the bad news. The good news is that the girl survived. And that law enforcement described the cookie-connected calamity as “seemingly an isolated incident.”]
