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STEWART |
Authorities are hoping a jury’s verdict on three serious felonies will put Alexis J. Stewart, 35, behind bars for years.
“He’s been a pain in the side of the Quincy and DeGraff communities for years,” Logan County Prosecutor Eric Stewart said Friday. “I’m very pleased with the verdict.”
A jury of 10 women and two men took about two hours to decide the defendant was guilty of two second-degree felony charges of corrupting another with drugs and a third-degree felony charge of illegal conveyance of drugs into a detention facility.
They acquitted him on two fifth-degree felony counts of possession of drugs after the two-day trial in front of Logan County Common Pleas Judge William T. Goslee.
Sentencing was set for 10 a.m. Nov. 13. If sentenced to the maximum on each count, the convicted drug dealer faces up to 19 years in prison.
He was arrested after a Jan. 14 incident in which Martha Baker, 61, of Quincy, overdosed on drugs he gave her.
Deputies of the Logan County Sheriff’s Office and DeGraff Fire and squad responded that afternoon to the Valero gas station at 319 Cretcher St., DeGraff, on a report of an unconscious woman in a vehicle.
At the hospital, the woman told deputies she gave Mr. Stewart a ride from Quincy to DeGraff and while he was in the vehicle, he was snorting a white substance, which he shared with her.
After speaking with the woman, deputies went to the defendant’s address and placed him under arrest.
Prosecutors also proved through the testimony of two inmates and through a recorded jail house conversation with an ex-Marine sent in undercover that the defendant smuggled drugs into the Logan County Jail by concealing the contraband in his rectum.
He admitted he provided the drugs to an inmate who also overdosed.
The defendant has two prior convictions for burglary in 2005 and 2006 and one for unlawful sexual conduct with a minor in 2011.