Detectives with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station’s Juvenile Intervention Team, or J-Team, which investigates drug crimes, arrested two suspects believed to be selling narcotics out of a storage unit near Valencia High School, according to court documents obtained by The Signal.
J-Team detectives arrested a man and a woman after pulling over their vehicle at 10:45 a.m. March 23 near the intersection of Placerita Canyon Road and Sierra Highway in Canyon Country, according to Natalie Arriaga, spokeswoman for the SCV Sheriff’s Station.
The reason given for the stop was the vehicle’s expired tags, according to station officials, but both suspects were known to local deputies due to numerous past encounters with local law enforcement.
And their investigation led them to a more significant discovery, according to court records.
Prior to the traffic stop, deputies had received information that a storage unit on Smyth Drive was being leased in someone else’s name but being used by the 41-year-old Newhall man and a 37-year-old Newhall woman they had pulled over, in order to store narcotics they sold.
It was not the first time deputies had received this information about this Newhall couple, who lived together in a “known drug house” on Costa Brava, according to court records.
Deputies also reported finding narcotics in a storage unit the man had leased in 2019, according to court records.
And in July 2022, the man was again picked up for possession of a controlled substance by SCV deputies, who found evidence of narcotics transactions on his cellphone, according to court records.
About three weeks later, they searched a Sand Canyon storage unit the suspect was leasing under someone else’s name, and both the 41-year-old and the 37-year-old were arrested, after two pounds of methamphetamine were recovered, according to the records.
A search of the man’s phone the following month yielded evidence of illegal narcotics transactions he had conducted with his female accomplice, according to law enforcement officials.
About five months later, the traffic stop in Canyon Country led to another arrest for the man and woman. This time the woman was arrested on suspicion of being an unlicensed driver, and the man was in possession of methamphetamine, brass knuckles and numerous denominations of currency that investigators reported was consistent with street-level narcotics sales.
This arrest led deputies to search a Valencia storage unit on Smyth Drive that was leased in another’s name but used by the man and woman, where they reported that they found two plastic bags containing a combined nearly 50 grams of methamphetamine, as well as a pipe used to smoke methamphetamine.
The man was ultimately arrested the day of the traffic stop and, despite an active case in the San Fernando Valley for felony drug charges for which he was due back in court April 12, the man bonded out in lieu of $20,000 bail. The woman was released the day after her arrest after bonding out in lieu of $30,000 bail, according to Sheriff’s Department records available online.