A West Wyomissing man faces felony charges after Spring Township police said they found a stolen firearm when they stopped his SUV near his home last month for having a suspended registration.<\/p>\n
Kenneth A. Vento Morales, 22, of the 2000 block of Girard Avenue was charged with receiving stolen property and carrying a firearm without a license.<\/p>\n
He was free on $20,000 bail to await a hearing following arraignment Saturday night before District Judge Priscilla Campos in Reading Central Court.<\/p>\n
According to court records:<\/p>\n
About 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, Officer Gregory Shober, while traveling east on Reading Boulevard in a patrol vehicle, pulled behind an SUV registered to Vento Morales that was stopped at a red light at the intersection with West Wyomissing Boulevard.<\/p>\n
He ran the license plate number for the SUV through a PennDOT database and learned it was suspended for unpaid traffic fines. There was also an insurance cancellation.<\/p>\n
As the light turned green, the officer activated his emergency lights, and the SUV pulled over on Reading Boulevard.<\/p>\n
Vento Morales, whose driver\u2019s license was also suspended, was in the front passenger seat. The driver, identified as Edwin Gutierrez, had a suspended New York driver\u2019s license and was wanted by the Berks County Sheriff\u2019s Office on a bench warrant. Further details of the warrant were unavailable.<\/p>\n
He and Vento Morales, who had eight open scofflaw warrants, were taken into custody.<\/p>\n
Police summoned a towing contractor for the uninsured vehicle. Before authorizing it to be towed, they conducted an inventory search per department policy.<\/p>\n
On the floor next to the front passenger seat \u2014 where Vento Morales\u2019 feet had been \u2014 was a cross-body bag.<\/p>\n
Shober found a loaded 9 mm pistol with an extended magazine in the bag. There were 11 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.<\/p>\n
A check through a law enforcement database revealed the gun had been reported stolen on July 22 to Reading police. The owner said it was taken from his residence on Maple Street.<\/p>\n
The gun was confiscated and sent to the Berks County Forensic Services Unit for DNA analysis. Police also obtained a search warrant to collect a DNA sample from Vento Morales.<\/p>\n
The results of the comparative analysis are pending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A West Wyomissing man faces felony charges after Spring Township police said they found a stolen firearm when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,202,182,139,28,128,130,129,3198,706],"class_list":["post-9143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-spring-township","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9143","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=9143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}