Accused denies knowing his apartment was ‘stash house’

A man charged with possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking testified on Wednesday that he had no idea his apartment was being used as a “stash house” for the drug-trafficking group targeted in Project Brazen.

“I’m here because I trusted the wrong person,” Jerimiah Dambo said in Brandon’s Court of King’s Bench. “He took advantage of that trust.”

Dambo was one of the 11 people arrested in Brandon Police Service’s 18-month operation in which they seized roughly three kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $300,000 from Dambo’s apartment.

While police found no evidence that Dambo trafficked drugs, his apartment was the alleged stash house.

During Dambo’s testimony, defence lawyer Jonathan Richert asked him to explain how he came to know the alleged “second-in-command” of the drug organization, who police believe directly reported to the ringleader.

Dambo said he grew up in Abuja, Nigeria, and moved to Brandon in 2019 to study computer science at Brandon University.

He said he went to a church in Brandon in October 2019, where he was introduced to the suspect through the suspect’s grandmother, also a Nigerian, so he would have someone to show him around the city.

“She felt like it would be good to introduce me to someone I could relate to,” he said.

He said the suspect would check on him every once in a while, and they went out for food a handful of times but didn’t communicate much other than that. He said the suspect was also a BU student, so they would see each other around campus.

When Richert asked why the suspect had his own key to Dambo’s apartment, he said the suspect was planning to move out of his grandmother’s place and needed a place to stay.

Dambo said the suspect was supposed to move in on May 3, 2021 — the day they were both arrested. He said he gave him a key in the meantime so he could have access to the apartment since Dambo’s schedule was busy between work and school.

He said he spent most of his time in his room studying or taking online classes with his door shut while he was there.

“I was helping out a friend who has been nice to me on several occasions,” Dambo said. “When he asked me for that favour, I didn’t see anything unusual about me helping him out.”

Richert asked if he let the suspect store anything at his apartment. Dambo said he let him use the linen closet since he didn’t use the space, but that he wasn’t aware the suspect kept drugs in there.

“If I saw anything, I would have confronted him and asked him to leave the place,” he said.

Crown attorney Stephen Sisson questioned Dambo on why he would give out a key to his apartment when he claims to be an introverted person.

Dambo repeated that he was just helping a friend.

Sisson asked what the suspect was doing in his apartment on specific dates. Dambo told him that he didn’t know and repeated that he stayed in his room.

In the Crown’s closing arguments on Friday, Crown attorney Julian Kim reminded the court that the central issue is possession and that the Crown isn’t trying to prove he was involved in any other aspect of the trafficking.

Kim listed multiple dates that Dambo was present while the suspect was allegedly packaging drugs, and pointed to the times Dambo let him into the apartment.

“There’s no disputing that the drugs themselves were actually in the accused’s physical custody. This was his apartment. He controlled whom and what flowed in and out of it,” Kim said. “It’s the knowledge component actually that we need to demonstrate.”

Kim said that it’s a human experience to know what is in a person’s own home.

“This wasn’t a grand mansion. This wasn’t an external building, a garage or a storage locker. This was a one-bedroom apartment that was well lived in.”

She pointed to the presence of a desk that sat in the common area of the apartment, which police believed to be a “packaging station,” as it had white debris on it and a knife covered in white powder.

“It was a common shared space that Dambo would have seen when he exited the room to use any other area of the home. This was not a hidden operation.”

She said the suggestion Dambo never left his room the entire time the suspect was there on any of the occasions was “not believable.”

“If it’s true that he did all of those things — never looking — then it was intentional,” she said. “Whenever there’s anything possibly incriminating, he distances himself to such extremes.”

In Richert’s closing arguments, he said that while he acknowledges the Crown isn’t arguing that Dambo was anything more than a stash holder, there wasn’t any forensic evidence taken, such as fingerprints, tying Dambo to the drugs.

He didn’t dispute that Dambo was there on occasions when the suspect was in the apartment, but said the suspect could have been making efforts to hide the operations from Dambo.

Richert said on all of the covert entries except for May 3, the drugs were tucked away and out of plain sight. He said on May 3, perhaps he was in a hurry to reload his drug runners and planned to clean up the drugs before Dambo came home.

“Nothing puts Dambo in the case, except for his tenancy and presence in the apartment,” Richert said. “He stayed, he didn’t flee, he wanted to have his day in court. He’s trusting the justice system to make the right decision.”

» sanderson@brandonsun.com