Scranton police found crack cocaine hidden in a flashlight of a man who fell asleep in a car, according to a criminal complaint.<\/p>\n
Jose Rivera, 52, of 405 S. Main Ave., faces a felony charge of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance.<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, at about 3 a.m. on Tuesday city officers noticed Rivera with his head slumped downward as he sat in the driver seat of his vehicle at the intersection of Birch Street and Cedar Avenue.<\/p>\n
Police noted Rivera was there for some time because snow was collecting on the windshields his Chevy Impala.<\/p>\n
Officers first approached the passenger side of the vehicle, where they observed Rivera asleep.<\/p>\n
Police knocked on the passenger side window, but Rivera didn\u2019t wake up, so they banged on the driver\u2019s side window. Rivera woke up, but appeared confused.<\/p>\n
He told officers he was taking a short nap because he had been working hard.<\/p>\n
As officers were speaking with Rivera, he was playing with something in his left pocket, which was making a jingling noise.<\/p>\n
Rivera told officers he was on his way to \u201cprogram,\u201d but when asked to explain due to the early hour, he didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Officers searched Rivera and found a large chunk of a rocklike substance in his right pocket in a small zip pouch, along with several small round blue pills in an unmarked pill bottle.<\/p>\n
When officers asked Rivera what the substance was, he replied \u201crock,\u201d which officers determined to be about two grams of crack cocaine.<\/p>\n
Rivera told officers the pills were clonazepam, for which he didn\u2019t have a prescription.<\/p>\n
Officers found $206 cash in Rivera\u2019s other pocket.<\/p>\n
While searching the vehicle, officers found a round flashlight in the driver\u2019s door that didn\u2019t work. Officer John Cantafio heard a rattling inside the flashlight, twisted it open and found four bags of crack cocaine concealed inside.<\/p>\n
When officers asked Rivera about the money, he first described it as what sounded like \u201ctrap money\u201d or \u201ccrack money\u201d and then corrected himself saying it was \u201cwork money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rivera also faces misdemeanor possession charges.<\/p>\n
He remains at Lackawanna County Prison in lieu of $75,000 bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for 9:45 a.m. on Nov. 20 before District Judge Paul Keeler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scranton police found crack cocaine hidden in a flashlight of a man who fell asleep in a car,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[20951,20950,20949,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-33393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-city-officers","tag-crack-cocaine","tag-jose-rivera","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}