Codey Starkey and Chiquita Rush sentenced one year after drug trafficking arrests
Codey Edward Starkey, 40, and Chiquita Irene Rush, 38, both of Zanesville, were sentenced a year after their drug dealing operation was uncovered.
Starkey, given 20 to 25.5 years in prison, pleaded no contest to four felonies: trafficking cocaine, first degree, trafficking methamphetamine, first degree, having weapons after being previously banned from owning them, third degree, and attempting to destroy evidence, third degree.
Rush was sentenced to 14 years and pleaded no contest to two felonies: trafficking fentanyl, first degree, and possessing weapons while previously banned, third-degree.
No contest pleas meant Rush and Starkey acknowledged the evidence against them but not admitting guilt. They accepted the consequences as if guilty, according to the Ohio Revised Code. They did so to preserve their ability to appeal, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney John Litle told the Times Recorder.
"Rush admitted to helping Starkey sell cocaine and was present during drug deals. "Her sentence was shorter because she played a smaller role in the operation," stated an announcement from the Muskingum County Prosecutor's Office.
In February 2024, the Central Ohio Drug Enforcement Task Force and the Zanesville and Muskingum County Drug Unit launched an investigation after an undercover drug-purchasing operation.
"Police got a search warrant for their house and discovered large amounts of drugs and weapons," noted the prosecutor's announcement.
Investigators found and confiscated more than 500 grams of marijuana, 300 grams of methamphetamine, more than 100 grams of fentanyl, and more than 30 grams of psychedelic mushrooms, the prosecutor's office explained.
The narcotics' value totaled between $700,000 and $1 million, noted Times Recorder reports.
During the search, Starkey tried to flush the drugs down the toilet to hide the evidence. Officers found fentanyl in the toilet and sink.
At least three guns were seized, including an AK-47, AR-15, and 9mm handgun, along with ammunition. Other forfeitures included two vehicles, a Ford F-150 and Nissan Maxima, and around $3,700 in cash. The indictment also listed a third vehicle forfeiture, a Buick Verano.
"These assets were determined to have been purchased with drug money and will be used to support future drug investigations and community programs," the prosecutor's office added.
Starkey and Rush had been held in the Muskingum County Jail on $1 million bonds. Both had prior criminal records that banned them from owning a gun.
Starkey's drug-related history and connected prison sentences were cause for concern. Common Pleas Judge Kelly Cottrill "agreed that a long sentence was needed to protect the public and punish Starkey for his continued criminal activity," the announcement said.
Starkey and Rush were indicted February 2024 on 16 felony counts and 14, respectively. They were listed as co-defendants for 11 of them. Initially, they had each been looking at 40-plus years if they had been convicted on all counts.
Other joint felony charges originally included illegal manufacturing, aggravated possession of drugs, and possession of cocaine, fentanyl, and marijuana.
More: Zanesville council moves step closer to taking Anchor Church property by eminent domain
Shawn Digity is a reporter for the Zanesville Times Recorder. He can be emailed at sdigity@gannett.com or found on X at @ShawnDigityZTR.
This article originally appeared on Zanesville Times Recorder: Zanesville pair linked with drug dealing operation sentenced
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Epoch Times
an hour ago
- Epoch Times
Michael Flynn on Declassified Russia Investigation Documents
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Former Trump national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn found himself at the center of a national firestorm when he was charged with lying to the FBI over a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The DOJ would later drop the case, saying there was no 'legitimate...
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Kill them all': Sectarian violence turns Syrian city into a slaughterhouse
SWEIDA, Syria — The last thing Hatem Radhwan heard the fighters say was, 'Kill them all. We don't want them identifying us.' That's when the five gunmen, clad in desert camouflage uniforms and who claimed they were with Syria's Ministry of Defense, cocked their AK-47 rifles, shouted, 'You pigs!' and sprayed the room with bullets. Radhwan, a 70-year-old blacksmith, felt a bullet or a piece of debris — he couldn't tell — graze his upper lip. He fell to the ground as the gunmen continued to fire. Rashad Abu Saadeh, a neighbor who hid in his apartment across the street, heard the gunfire. 'For more than half a minute they kept shooting,' he said. 'It felt like a long, long time.' The killings at the Radhwan family salon were part of a paroxysm of sectarian violence that engulfed the Druze-majority city of Sweida last week. The fighting, which involved tank and mortar bombardment, summary executions and Israeli airstrikes, left some 1,380 dead, displaced more than 120,000 others — and turned what once was a well-appointed city, largely spared the ravages of Syria's 14-year civil war, into a slaughterhouse. 'There isn't a single home in the whole province that isn't grieving someone,' said Randa Mihrez, one of the coroners at Sweida National Hospital. A truce halted the clashes — which began this month between Bedouin clans and the Druze religious minority — but the tallying of the losses continues. Mihrez's colleague Akram Naim scrolled through images of the 509 corpses brought to the hospital's courtyard during the fighting. They were transferred to a mass grave on Wednesday after days of decomposing in the summer heat. 'The youngest victim was 3 months old, killed by shrapnel that hit her stomach,' he said. He clicked on another photo — a young girl, her head turned to the side, with a morose expression on her face. A scarlet line ran across her throat. 'This one was 14. She was slaughtered,' Naim said, his voice subdued. 'These are only the people we know about and who could reach us,' Mihrez said, adding that many victims were buried in makeshift graves near people's homes because the hospital had been surrounded during much of the battles. 'The final tally will be much worse,' he said. At the Radhwan house, the blacksmith finally dared to open his eyes five minutes after the gunmen left, only to find 17 of his family members bloodied around him. Thirteen were killed outright; four others survived but remain in critical condition, while a fifth relative died later. Radhwan was the only one mostly unharmed. 'They were screaming, and I tried to move them, to help them somehow. But I kept slipping on the blood,' Radhwan said, his gaze following the brown-red stain that crept from the couch down to the salon floor. 'One relative was bleeding out and barely alive. He was begging, 'Shoot me.' But I had no weapons on me. I would have done it otherwise,' he said. The crisis in Sweida, which comes at the heels of similar bouts of sectarian bloodshed against minorities by state-aligned groups, highlights the challenges facing interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who seized power in December after leading a coalition of rebel groups to topple longtime dictator Bashar Assad. Though he received support from President Trump — who fast-tracked the lifting of sanctions, reopened the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and dispatched an envoy who has championed the new government — Al-Sharaa has so far failed to convince rival factions to centralize under his authority, and his government forces have essentially aligned themselves with the Bedouins. Instead, the euphoria over Assad's ouster has been replaced by sense of foreboding among many Syrians, especially minorities, who distrust Al-Sharaa's Islamist past. More hard-line members of his faction, the onetime Al Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al Sham, view Druze as heretics who should be killed. That has been especially true for the Druze, adherents of a syncretic sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam who constitute some 3% of Syria's population. There are an estimated 1 million Druze worldwide, half of them in Syria and the rest in Lebanon, Israel and elsewhere. Many Syrian Druze speak proudly — and often — of their sect's role in building the country's nationalist consciousness, with families touting their filial link to Sultan Al-Atrash, a revolutionary who mounted an uprising against French rule in Syria in the 1920s. Sweida, both the city and the eponymously named province, are the only areas of the country with a Druze majority. During the civil war, Sweida kept a wary distance from both Assad and the opposition, and government allowed it some measure of autonomy. Since Assad's exit, prominent figures in the Druze community have sought to have a good relationship with Damascus, but the militias have rejected integration under Al-Sharaa's armed services, which they say are composed of unruly factions not totally under the interim leader's control. When tit-for-tat kidnappings and robberies between Bedouins and Druze escalated into open warfare this month, the government mobilized its forces to restore order. But Druze residents accused them of engaging in a sectarian killing rampage, and fought back. Israel, which since Assad's exit occupies wide swaths of its northern neighbor's border areas and has demanded south Syria be a demilitarized zone, responded to demands from its own Druze to protect their coreligionists and launched airstrikes targeting the Damascus headquarters of the Syrian army and the presidential palace. It also struck forces in Sweida, forcing them to withdraw. In the aftermath of those strikes, Al-Sharaa accused Israel of interfering in Syrian affairs and trying to keep the country weak. But on Thursday, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, said he met with Syrian and Israeli officials in Paris to broker 'dialogue and de-escalation' — the first high-level talks between the two countries since 2000. 'And we accomplished precisely that. All parties reiterated their commitment to continuing these efforts,' Barrack wrote on X on Thursday. Meanwhile, the mood in the city of Sweida remains tense. Standing near the fire-blackened husk of an Israeli-hit tank, Yamen Zughayer, a Druze faction commander, looked down a road leading out of Sweida. 'There are still bodies of our people we can't get back. A sniper is waiting for us down there,' he said. He walked down a side street, pointing out the singed remains of houses that he said were torched by Bedouins and government-linked fighters. 'For 14 years of the war, nothing happened to Sweida. [For] three hours the government came in, and look what happened,' he said. Zughayer, a 35-year-old who usually worked as a car dealer, said the tragedies inflicted on Sweida proved Druze suspicious of Al-Sharaa were correct. 'What do you think would have happened if we didn't have our guns? We're sitting here talking to you because of them,' Zughayer said, adding that he wouldn't accept any solution that didn't involve the militiamen retaining their arms. Hashem Thabet, another fighter standing nearby, said although he did not want Israel controlling the territory, the actions of the Syrian government were driving Druze like him away. 'I don't care who comes to protect me as long as they do it. If it's Israel, then welcome Israel,' he said. The government, he added, is 'pushing us into its arms.' A few miles away from where he stood vigil, on a bare mountain outside Sweida's outskirts, Basel Abu Saab looked with grim satisfaction at the trench he had dug with his bulldozer — a mass grave for 149 people from the hospital who were either unidentified or whose families were unable to bury them. 'Initially, we wanted to bury them in the hospital's backyard, but administrators worried we'd contaminate the water reservoir,' Abu Saab said. 'The bodies were decomposing too much in the sun, they were becoming unrecognizable. We just couldn't wait anymore.' Yes, the location chosen for the mass grave was far from the city, he added, but it also was far from the fighting. Abu Saab trudged back to the nearby road, walking around a pit where he had buried the blood-soiled body bags, his nose wrinkling at the scent. From the pit's edge, the edge of a hospital garment peeked out, fluttering erratically in the dusk breeze.
Hamilton Spectator
3 days ago
- Hamilton Spectator
‘Significant spike' in impaired driving includes six Hamilton deaths
Hamilton police are warning about a concerning rise in impaired driving, including three fatal drunk-driving crashes that have killed six people — among them a 10-year-old girl — since June. On Friday, police announced they have laid impaired and dangerous driving charges in one of the fatal collisions — a three-vehicle crash on June 1 on Upper Centennial Parkway that killed two people. A 32-year-old Hamilton man is accused of drunk driving, driving double the 70 kilometre per hour limit, and driving an unsafe vehicle. The 'significant spike' in impaired driving cases includes a 25 per cent increase in May over 2024, and a 53 per cent increase in June compared to the same month last year, said Const. Trevor McKenna. Overall impaired driving offences are up 11 per cent over 2024. So far this year police have laid 369 impaired charges, with 216 people charged, he said. On June 1, shortly after midnight, police were called to a three-vehicle crash on Upper Centennial Parkway between Mud Street East and Green Mountain Road. The investigation revealed two pickup trucks were southbound when one — a 2014 Ford F-150 — hit the other and then crossed into northbound lanes where it struck a 2015 Kia Sorento head-on. The driver and passenger in the car were tragically killed, police said. They were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the F-150 was treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries. Following an investigation by the collision reconstruction unit, he was arrested Thursday. Nemanja Trivanovic, 32, from Hamilton is charged criminally with two counts of dangerous driving causing death, two counts of impaired driving causing death and two counts of having over 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood causing death. He faces further charges, under the Highway Traffic Act, of stunt driving, speeding 140 km/h in a 70 zone, having defective brakes and operating an unsafe vehicle. The families of the victims are requesting privacy as they grieve, police said in a release Friday. A little over a month after that fatal crash, 30-year-old Julia Smith and her 10-year-old daughter Grace were killed after their car was struck head-on by a pickup truck. Police allege the pickup driver was trying to pass another vehicle on Trinity Church Road on July 6. Grace died at the scene and her mom died in hospital just over a week later. Two men, also in the Honda Civic they were travelling in, were hurt in the crash. McKenna said investigators have identified impaired driving as a factor in the crash. That investigation is ongoing and charges have not yet been laid. Impaired driving was also allegedly behind fiery crash at the top of the Claremont Access that killed two people on June 22 around 3 a.m. In that case, police believe the Chevrolet was southbound on the access, when it left the road, hit the stone wall near Southam Park and caught fire. Both the driver and the passenger were pronounced dead at the scene and no other vehicles were involved. In response to the troubling increase in cases, police are reminding the public there are always alternatives to getting behind the wheel while impaired. These include designating a sober driver, calling a taxi or ride share, and using public transit. 'Plan ahead, your life and others depend on it,' police said. Police say they are also increasing RIDE lanes on the road, and on the water through the marine unit. If you suspect someone is driving impaired, call 911. Nicole O'Reilly is a crime and justice reporter at The Spectator. noreilly@ Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
