MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — West Virginia will not be a “source state” for firearms, according to U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld II.
It’s just not all talk, either. According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 47 people were sentenced in the Northern District of West Virginia for firearm-related offenses in fiscal year 2014, a 3 percent higher rate than the national trend.
Last week, a federal grand jury in Martinsburg indicted four people on federal gun charges, three of whom were in an alleged conspiracy to conduct a “straw purchase”-having someone with a clean record buy a gun on behalf of someone who can’t legally. Ihlenfeld said the crackdown on straw purchases is one way of making sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands.
“Public safety is our number one concern here, whether it be preventing guns from getting in the hands of felons, the mentally ill or people addicted to drugs,” he said. “One of the things that really grabs our attention is when someone comes from another state to buy the guns here, because usually there’s a purpose for it.”
Just as heroin flows from larger cities to West Virginia, Ihlenfeld said guns sometimes travel from the Mountain State to other states, particularly those with stricter gun laws like Maryland or Illinois. In the latest case, 21-year-old Curtessa Franklin, of Massachusetts, allegedly conspired with two Martinsburg residents to have them buy guns on her behalf.
On Dec. 10, 2015, she was picked up on a simple possession charge during the attempted sale of a Taurus 9mm caliber pistol, according to court records. On Jan. 20, a federal grand jury indicted Curtessa and her associates.
“The Franklin case had a quick turnaround,” he said. “I really have to applaud the efforts of the West Virginia State Police and the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) on that, because it takes a lot of work to check each box to take these kinds of cases to the grand jury.”
“Checking boxes” makes up a good portions of federal guns cases, particularly with straw purchases, Ihlenfeld said. Whenever someone buys a gun from a federally licensed firearms dealer, he or she has to fill out a form checked by the ATF. If someone conducts a straw purchase, then they are lying that the gun is for them-which is a federal crime punishable of up to 10 years in prison, per federal law.
While Ihlenfeld stressed that every county in the district is impacted by straw purchases, border areas like the Eastern Panhandle are especially susceptible to it.
“We see significant amounts of firearms going over state lines into the nearest cities,” he said. “In the Eastern Panhandle, it’s Baltimore (Maryland), in the Northern Panhandle, it’s cities in Ohio or Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania). Whenever you have more opportunity for interstate travel, you see more trafficking of any commodity. The interstate travel aspect also gives us more of an opportunity to prosecute it.”
However, many times straw purchases are not prosecuted on the state level, Ihlenfeld said. This is partly because of the federal aspects of the form and partly because many states do not have laws on the books regulating it, he said, adding that county prosecutors still play a big part in developing these cases.
Earlier this month, Ihlenfeld said he met with prosecutors in Morgan, Berkeley and Jefferson counties to discuss how to collaborate on firearms cases.
“We try to do outreach because county prosecutors see a lot more reports from the police than we do,” he said. “They refer the cases to us and we check them out, see if it’s something that we can prosecute.”
Staff writer Henry Culvyhouse can be contacted at 304-263-8931, ext. 215, or twitter.com/HCulvyhouseJN.
