College student who tried shipping heroin to NWC campus pleads to felony

Posted 7/31/18

A former Northwest College student who arranged to have heroin shipped to campus last year has been placed on supervised probation.

Jonathon R. Chevrier, 22, was arrested in April 2017 after …

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College student who tried shipping heroin to NWC campus pleads to felony

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A former Northwest College student who arranged to have heroin shipped to campus last year has been placed on supervised probation.

Jonathon R. Chevrier, 22, was arrested in April 2017 after trying to pick up a package that had contained a couple of grams of heroin.

As part of a deal with the Park County Attorney’s Office that was finalized last month, Chevrier pleaded guilty to a felony count of attempting to possess a controlled substance with intent to deliver it.

County Attorney Bryan Skoric said Chevrier’s defense attorney, William Struemke of Cody, requested a deferred prosecution on the charge, but “there was no way I was going down that road” with the substance being heroin, he said.

Another felony count of delivering a controlled substance — related to a small amount of marijuana he reportedly sold in a law enforcement sting — was dismissed as part of the deal.

Chevrier received credit for the roughly five months he spent in jail after his arrest, with another four to six years of prison time suspended in favor of the probation.

District Court Judge Bill Simpson accepted the arrangement and imposed the sentence on June 29.

Chevrier came to NWC from suburban Detroit and has since moved back there.

Court records indicate he came on the radar of local Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agents in early February 2017. That’s when two people reported Chevrier was selling various drugs to college students.

In late March, one of the informants told DCI Special Agent Darrell Steward that Chevrier had returned from spring break with multiple ounces of marijuana from Billings.

Under Steward’s supervision, the informant bought a gram of marijuana from Chevrier for $20 on March 28, 2017.

During the transaction, Chevrier reportedly said he “hated” selling marijuana, because “there was not enough profit for the amount of work he had to do,” Steward later recounted in court documents.

Chevrier reportedly said he’d be getting heroin soon.

A package from Mammoth Lakes, California, and addressed to Chevrier arrived at the NWC mail office on April 4. After a Powell Police K-9, Zeke, alerted to the scent of narcotics on the package, Steward obtained a search warrant and seized the package, finding a few hats and 2.8 grams (about one-tenth of an ounce) of heroin inside.

The agent took out the drugs, inserted a search warrant and receipt, then resealed the box.

Chevrier arrived at the mailroom a short time later, picked up his package and then was taken into custody.

Chevrier wound up serving 149 days in the Park County Detention Center between his April 4 arrest and his release on bond in early September 2017.

He was allowed to return to Michigan not long after that and completed a drug treatment program.

“Hopefully this was a learning experience for him,” Skoric said of Chevrier, saying the felony conviction is something he’ll have to live with from “a pretty young age.”

During his alleged marijuana sale, Chevrier asked the informant about local heroin market and was told that there was a high demand for the drug and few suppliers, according to court documents.

Skoric said last week that, thankfully, the number of heroin-related incidents in Park County appears to have stabilized.

From the cases that are reaching his office, “we’re not seeing an uptick,” he said.

Heroin is an opioid, being one of the deadly drugs responsible for the nationwide “Opioid Crisis.”

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