One day in Lewiston last November, police found more than 3 1/2 pounds of cocaine between a motel room and at a house a few miles away. Some of it was in a duffel bag; the rest was in a safe.
It was enough to arrest Steven Braggs, who was already on federal probation for a gun charge out of Massachusetts, and charge him with federal drug crimes carrying a minimum prison sentence of five years.
Despite the large quantity of drugs, the case fell apart. In June, federal prosecutors dismissed the charges against Braggs, then reached a deal that allows him to return to the community instead of having his probation revoked.
Those decisions came shortly after Braggs made a series of misconduct allegations in court against the officers involved in his arrest, primarily those with U.S. Probation and Parole, the federal agency charged with supervising people convicted of crimes in the community.
The timeline of the dismissal in the criminal case suggests that policing failures torpedoed the prosecution of a major drug bust. While it is normal for defendants to challenge criminal charges against them, this case stands out by alleging concerns about the credibility of some of the officers involved.
It centers on a decision by federal probation officers to search Braggs’ wife’s house on Wellman Street after they found drugs at his motel room without her permission or a warrant, allegedly in violation of the Fourth Amendment. A probation officer then gave shifting and implausible explanations for justifying that search, Braggs’ federal public defender, Heather Gonzales, alleged in federal court filings.
Gonzales cited home surveillance footage that captured parts of the allegedly unconstitutional search until law enforcement officers realized they were being recorded and shut the cameras off. One recording ends just seconds after a Lewiston police officer arrived at the house and asked probation why they were there if the wife wasn’t, video shows.
Kristy Braggs, Steven’s wife, later found the disabled camera in her microwave. The video is one of the few records that documented the conduct of law enforcement that day, Gonzales wrote in a court filing.
It is not clear how the law enforcement agencies involved in the case responded to challenges of their conduct. Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not formally respond to the allegations in court before they dismissed the case on the basis that “further prosecution of this matter is no longer in the interest of justice.”
U.S. Probation and Parole, which led the search and faced the most pointed criticisms related to competence and honesty, declined to comment on the case.
The events of that day began in the morning, when federal officers believed Steven Braggs was violating the terms of his probation, giving them cause to search his room at the SureStay motel off of State Route 196. At the time, he was not living with his wife at their home on Wellman Street because she had filed a protection from abuse order against him.
Probation, assisted by Lewiston police, found more than 130 grams of cocaine in his room and officers placed him under arrest, according to court records.
What happened next became the focus of a dispute. A probation officer wrote in a report that Braggs told Lewiston police he had taken drugs out of a storage unit and stored them at his wife’s house. Braggs later denied telling police this. Police made no record of a confession, Gonzales said.
Probation then went to Kristy Braggs’ home on Wellman Street, using a key they got from Steven to let themselves in and begin searching. They found at least a kilogram of cocaine in a safe and Oxycodone pills in an underwear drawer, according to the probation report.
When two Lewiston Police officers around around 1 p.m., a Ring camera captured the moment of their arrival.
“The wife’s not here?” the officer asks as he comes through the door.
When a probation officer replies that she isn’t, he asks, “OK, so how did we end up here?”
The rest of the conversation was not recorded because an officer alerted the group that they were being recorded and they turned the camera off. Probation also disabled a camera in a bedroom, video shows.
When Kristy Braggs got home, the camera was in the microwave and the house was torn apart, she said in an interview. There was urine in a toilet. Her dog, Boss, had eaten an entire container of onion powder that is toxic to dogs and had been left out.
“There is no privacy if people can just walk into your house with no probable cause,” Kristy Braggs said in an interview.
A court never weighed in on the legality of the search because prosecutors dropped the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Lizotte did not comment on those allegations, saying by phone it was his office’s policy not to comment on cases beyond what is in the public record.
Lt. Derrick St. Laurent of the Lewiston police said a sergeant advised probation to contact the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency to obtain a warrant when city officers arrived at Wellman Street.
He declined to comment on whether the search they joined was illegal, saying city police played a supporting role in this case and did not have all the facts. Officers likely shut the cameras off for safety reasons, he added, wary of conducting a search on a live feed not knowing who was watching.
An MDEA officer obtained a warrant from a judge later that afternoon, court records show.
Officers should have been more careful that day, David Sarni, a former New York City Police detective who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said.
After finding drugs at the motel, law enforcement should not have rushed to the house but waited to talk to Braggs’ wife or applied for a warrant, Sarni said. He also criticized police for failing to document their conduct in a way that would clearly justify their actions later in court and especially questioned the decision to disable the security cameras.
“Is it a conspiracy to do things wrong or overzealousness?” he said, of the decision to enter the house without a warrant. “Shutting the cameras off can lead you to believe they were doing something nefarious.”
When the case moved to federal court in the spring, Braggs’ attorney repeatedly referred to the lack of police reports or bodyworn footage from that day, including the lack of documents supporting the rationale for the search: that her client allegedly admitted in the back of a Lewiston police cruiser to moving drugs to the house.
“They have no proof I said that,” Braggs said in an interview.
The alleged admission was described in one of the only documents created that day, a report by Braggs’ probation officer, Autumn Murtagh. When Gonzales followed up with Murtagh about the source of that information, Murtagh wrote in an email that MDEA agent Aaron Schmitz told her and that she didn’t have any documentation of the conversation, “just a phone call with my colleagues present for that.”
That explanation changed, Gonzales argued. There was no documentation of that conversation because it happened over text, not in a phone call, she wrote. But Braggs never said he moved drugs back to his wife’s house. According to a screenshot in the court filing, Schmitz said he moved “stuff.”
Murtagh asked him to clarify if “stuff” meant drugs or guns. Schmitz repeated “stuff.” He was the officer who applied for a warrant to seize the drugs found at Wellman Street. In his affidavit, he only referred to Braggs saying that he returned her “personal belongings” to the house. The alleged confession of drugs that is referred to in the probation officer’s record is “conspicuously absent,” the defense lawyer wrote.
Despite the discrepancies, Gonzales called the admission implausible. Braggs was wearing a GPS ankle monitor that showed he never went to his wife’s house, so why would he say he did?
After prosecutors dismissed the drug case, there was still a pending case to keep Braggs in jail by revoking his ability to remain in the community on probation. In a motion to dismiss that case, Gonzales accused probation of a “lack of candor” in its representation of the case that jeopardized the integrity of the proceedings and warrant sanctions. The lawyer cited “false and misleading information to support the most serious intrusions on individual liberty.”
Murtagh, Braggs’ probation officer, declined to comment when reached by a reporter on the phone. A spokesperson for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency also declined to answer questions about the case.
The court never considered the request for sanctions because Braggs agreed to a deal that released him from jail back to probation. He and his wife now live in Massachusetts.
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at cferguson@bangordailynews.com.