Philly-area man trafficked 15 guns, and some were later used in multiple shootings and homicides, prosecutors say
Ballistic tests linked two guns to seven different shooting scenes with a combined 14 victims.
A Montgomery County man has been charged with trafficking 15 guns — two of them linked to multiple shootings, including three homicides in Philadelphia, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Tamir Hartsock, 23, of Glenside, is facing numerous gun trafficking charges, conspiracy, and related crimes after Montgomery County prosecutors say he bought more than a dozen guns then resold them to people barred from buying weapons themselves, a practice known as straw purchasing.
Prosecutors said that less than a month after his 21st birthday — Pennsylvania’s legal age to buy a firearm — Hartsock traveled across Montgomery County and bought 11 guns from three different stores in just six months, from September 2020 to March 2021. He often purchased the guns online, then picked them up from a licensed dealer in the area, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.
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Hartsock purchased 10 of the weapons from Abington Armoury in Glenside, a small licensed dealer less than two miles from his home, and some months returned up to three times to buy different guns, the affidavit said.
Hartsock’s arrest comes as prosecutors across the region invest more resources in investigating straw purchasing — a crime often difficult to detect, but that law enforcement officials have said is a notable contributor to the flood of illegal guns on Philadelphia’s streets and a factor in the city’s gun violence crisis.
Only four of the 15 guns Hartsock purchased have been recovered, said Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele.
“There’s 11 firearms that are still in the wind. We don’t know where they are,” he said. “We don’t know what kind of violence or crimes they’ve been used in, and we don’t know what crimes they will be used in.”
Gun trafficking, he said, “is enabling violence and murder.”
The investigation into Hartsock was launched after multiple law enforcement agencies recovered guns he had purchased on other people and then noticed that none of those weapons was reported stolen — an indicator of straw purchasing.
One Glock 44 was found in a car in North Philadelphia during a DUI stop in June 2021, while a Taurus 9mm handgun was recovered during a traffic stop and search in Delaware County last October.
Two other guns were recovered after shootings, and subsequent ballistic tests linked them to a total of seven shooting scenes with a combined 14 victims, authorities said.
On Sept. 6, 2022, Philadelphia police heard 50 shots fired near Carlisle Street and Girard Avenue in North Philadelphia, and as they were responding, records say, a red Nissan speeding away from the scene crashed, and three people with guns got out and fled. They were caught, and one of the three guns recovered was a Glock 22 that Hartsock had purchased two years earlier.
Police ran the gun through a national ballistic testing system and found bullets fired from that gun had been linked to four other shootings:
On Jan. 15, 2021, a shooting occurred at 5043 Greene St. in Germantown. No one was injured, but numerous shell casings that matched the gun were recovered.
On Aug. 4, 2021, four people were shot on the 3600 block of Germantown Avenue.
Just two weeks later, on Aug. 19, five people were shot outside a barbershop on the 5100 block of Germantown Avenue. A 28-year-old man was killed.
Then, on May 30, 2022, Frank Bell, 20, was fatally shot on the 1500 block of West Erie Avenue.
Prosecutors say the fourth gun — a Glock 27 that Hartsock purchased in February 2021 — was recovered just last month at the scene of a shooting in the Northeast in which four juveniles, ages 14 to 17, were shot, three fatally. Steele said ballistics testing showed that one of the bullets recovered in one of the teen’s bodies was fired from that gun.
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Additional testing linked bullets fired from the gun to a January shooting on the 3600 block of Indian Queen Lane in East Falls, though no one was injured.
None of the homicides the guns were linked to have been solved, prosecutors said. Steele said it’s unclear how many times the guns changed hands, and could not comment on whether different shooters used the gun each time.
Steele said Hartsock, who worked at a local Wawa, made a few hundred dollars from each purchase, and text messages recovered from his phone showed how he coordinated with interested buyers. The records showed one exchange as the following:
“How much for the Taurus g3?” one person texted Hartsock, referencing a model of gun.
About $700, Hartsock replied.
“How much the g2?” the buyer asked.
Same cost, though he could probably get it for $400 at an auction, Hartsock told him.
The buyer agreed — “ion need a new jawn,” he said.
Hartsock also sent screenshots of various guns being sold online, asking which model and color the buyer preferred.
Steele said the case shows the danger just a few trafficked guns can bring to a community.
“When people are putting these guns onto the streets,” he said, “they are putting the mechanism of death into the hands of violent criminals.”
When authorities searched Hartsock’s home, Steele said, they found two weapons he had held onto — a black shotgun and gold-plated AR-15 — and at his mother’s house were three gun boxes, all empty.