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The quartet – one of them a former nurse convicted of raping a patient – apparently was headed back north after buying the drugs in Paterson, police said.
They’d just crossed the Passaic River over the Lincoln Avenue bridge when Hawthorne police got a call of a suspicious vehicle parked for “an extended period of time” at the Sunoco station on Wagaraw Road, Detective Lt. Matthew Hoogmoed said.
In the driver’s seat of the 2011 Jeep Liberty was Jena Jarvis, 28, from Keeseville, NY, who pointed toward Paterson and said that they’d just visited a friend there, Hoogmoed said.
In plain view were multiple hypodermic syringes and some drugs, he added.
The officers arrested Jarvis, along with James Laduke, 28, of Dannemora, NY, Derek Darwin, 32, of Morrisonville, NY, and Darwin’s girlfriend, Jessica Dresser, a 36-year-old registered sex offender from Plattsburgh, NY.
They also seized 49 brick of heroin, each containing 50 heroin folds, and 1.3 ounces of crack, Hoogmoed said.
Dresser was a nurse at an addiction treatment center when she twice had sex with a patient whom she’d given drugs to in February 2016, records show.
She was sentenced to 60 days in jail and six years of supervised probation and had to surrender her LPN license as part of a plea deal following the incidents at St. Joseph's Addiction Treatment and Recovery Centers in Saranac Lake, authorities said.
Darwin, meanwhile, was once accused of lunging at police and trying to eat drugs during a 2018 MV stop in Plattsburgh, according to news reports at the time.
Dresser, Darwin, Jarvis and Laduke were charged by Hawthorne police with possession and distributing heroin and crack in the March 6 noontime incident, Hoogmoed said.
All four were sent to the Passaic County Jail to await first appearances in Central Judicial Processing Court in Paterson, he said.
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