WEST CHESTER >> The East Goshen man who left behind a backpack full of marijuana after he was seen skateboarding on a dark road in the middle of night pleaded guilty Tuesday to drug possession charges, and was scolded by the judge who sentenced him for getting himself in criminal trouble through drug use.
“You have got to straighten up,” Common Pleas Judge Anthony Sarcione told Adam James Dare during the brief proceeding in court, at the end of which Dare was sentenced to one year probation on the charge of possession of a controlled substance. “This path is shaky you are going down. This has to wake you up.”
Dare, although he said little during the hearing directly about his drug use, acknowledged that his arrest by Willistown police in March was not the first time he had crossed lines with the law. He has convictions for underage drinking, driving under the influence, and possession.
“This has to stop,” Sarcione told Dare, who was accompanied in court by his attorney, Evan Kelly of West Chester, and his parents, who sat in the back of the courtroom and listened as he pleaded guilty to the charges.
Dare, 23, was arrested March 11 after police who were searching woods near Forest Lane in Willistown found a backpack belonging to him that had a large bag of marijuana in it. Dare had evidently dropped it as he was running from Willistown Sgt. George Hill, who had tried to stop him while he was skateboarding on a dark road about 1:45 a.m.
According to Assistant District Attorney Robert Jefferson IV, the amount of marijuana in the pack was 431 grams, just under one pound of the drug. The maximum term that Dare could have been sentenced to for the possession was one year in state prison.
Jefferson told Sarcione that police did not have any reason to believe Dare was selling the drugs since there was no additional paraphernalia to indicate that, such as a scale, a list of customers or large amounts of cash in the book bag.
He told the judge that his superiors in the District Attorney’s office had approved the plea agreement, as had the Willistown police.
Hill had testified at a suppression hearing last month that he spotted Dare skateboarding down the middle of Sugartown Road after being asked to check the situation by another officer. He said he pulled alongside Dare and asked him to stop so he could talk to him about the dangers of skateboarding on a dark road at night. But Dare refused to stop.
“I kept saying, ‘Can you stop for a second?’ ” Hill told Sarcione during the hearing ” ‘I just want to talk to you for a minute.’ I knew there would be warnings to get out of the roadway. It’s dangerous what he was dong, I thought.”
The officer told Sarcione that the only thing on his mind when he was backing up was to tell the skater, “to be careful. Don’t be skateboarding down the middle of the road. Why are you out here? It’s 1 o’clock in the morning. Don’t be doing this.”
Dare instead sped up, making a sudden turn onto Forest Lane, a side street off Sugartown Road. Hill followed him, and watched as the skater jumped off his board, and leapt over a railing for a small bridge over a creek that runs underneath the road. He saw him fall about 6 feet into the creek bed, then run off. He called for a search, fearing that the skater would be injured running through the woods in the dark.
Police from Willistown, Tredyffrin, and other departments responded, and even brought out thermal imaging technology to aid their efforts to find the skater. Despite Hill’s concern that the skater had hit his head on a tree branch in the dark and knocked himself unconscious, they did not locate him that night – only a sneaker, a hat, and the backpack with the marijuana.
To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544