CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A fired Cuyahoga County Jail guard has been charged with smuggling drugs to an inmate when he worked at the lock-up last year.
A Cuyahoga County grand jury accused Keonte Calhoun, 31, of drug trafficking, drug possession and illegal conveyance, all felonies. He was dismissed in November.
Quincy Pucci, a former inmate, and Kimberly Carnegie were also charged in the indictment.
All are set to be arraigned in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court on May 15. A county spokeswoman said Calhoun worked as a corrections officer from June 5 to Nov. 13 last year.
Adam Chaloupka, an attorney for the union that represents corrections officers, said that Calhoun was on departmental probation, which is standard for all new hires, when the county ended his employment.
Calhoun, of Brook Park, is also charged separately with domestic violence, strangulation and aggravated menacing in a December incident in Berea. A woman told police Calhoun squeezed her neck until she couldn’t breathe and pulled a gun and told her she didn’t deserve to live, according to court records.
The investigation that resulted in this week’s indictment against Calhoun started on Sept. 19, when an inmate in the jail suffered a drug-related medical emergency, according to court records.
Sheriff’s department narcotics detectives began to investigate the source of the drugs and traced them back to Pucci, who was jailed on weapons and food stamp fraud charges, according to court records.
Investigators discovered that Pucci arranged a meeting between Calhoun and Carnegie, who was Pucci’s friend, prosecutors said. Carnegie gave synthetic marijuana and money to Calhoun to bring to Pucci, prosecutors said.
Calhoun’s dismissal letter says his employment at the jail ended Nov. 10 because he failed to render aid in a timely manner to the inmate Sept. 19.
In a December court filing in the domestic violence case, a public defender wrote that Calhoun had recently begun working as an Amazon delivery driver. The filing made no mention of his previous work for the county.
Smuggling is a long-running issue within the Cuyahoga County Jail. The jail recorded 229 drug seizures in 2022, more than double the 111 incidents logged in 2021, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reported.