Cornell Senior Smuggled Heroin, Edited Cornell Daily Sun (Update)
Police arrested Cornell senior Keri Blakinger while she was holding $150,000 worth of heroin, which she confessed was hers. A Cornell Daily Sun staffer, Keri posed in bikinis on Facebook—and hung out in a notorious drug den.
An English major and transfer student from Rutgers, Keri was arrested in an Ithaca parking lot with a Tupperware container of $150,000 (see update below) worth of uncut heroin in her hand, which she admitted to cops belonged to her. This makes Keri's arrest the second biggest drug bust in the Ithaca Police Department's history. According to her Facebook page, Keri was an editor of Daze, weekend magazine of The Cornell Daily Sun. She had weekly bylines in the spring of 2010.
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In her Facebook photos, she wears a camo-print bikini and romps in Ithaca's famous gorges. She poses with a cigarette and flicks off the camera on campus.
IvyGate reports that Keri's life coincided with an earlier Ithaca drug bust:
In early 2009, the Ithaca police raided an apartment in Collegetown where Blakinger's boyfriend was allegedly living. The Ithaca SWAT team was called in to bust what was reported to be a drug den at the location, although Blakinger's name appears nowhere in any reports of the incident we can find. According to a Cornell Sun article, the raid was targeting heroin, and cash and scales were retrieved, although no arrests were made.
Another person who lived in the building said strangers knocked on Keri's door at all hours, and that the neighbors had grown suspicious. Here's her "Favorite Quote" from Facebook:
Police say Keri was "of an altered mind" during her arrest, but I like to imagine she muttered "Operation: Ivy League, my ass" as the cops were hauling her away. [IvyGate, Cornell Sun, Ithaca Journal]
Update: Though initial reports—including the a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/AP69e563a46a99455cbb12e024143af8e5.html">Associated Press' write-up—value Keri's heroin cache at $150,000, the Ithaca Police Department valued it at $50,000-$100,000 in its police report. Below, the report, which lists Blakinger's name as "Kerri."