Tossed bottle leads to arrest of three

It started with a plastic bottle.

Camden County Sheriff Charles Billingham, on his way to work at City Hall in an unmarked car, saw the bottle in his rearview mirror. A driver behind him was tossing it out the window to the side of the road.

Irritated by the seemingly simple offense near downtown Camden on Tuesday afternoon - "It drives me nuts when people make Camden worse than what it is," Billingham said - the sheriff stepped out of his car and approached the black Chevrolet Impala.

When he identified himself, he said, the car took off.

Billingham pulled it over a couple of blocks away and questioned the three young men inside. The driver was polite, Billingham said, but the passengers were jittery. One wouldn't look at him.

So Billingham called for backup.

Inside the car, authorities discovered, were two loaded handguns - a .40-caliber and a 9mm semiautomatic - and 50 packets of heroin, the sheriff's office said.

Emir Blackward, 21, who authorities said was the driver; Robert McFadden, 25; and Jakaiye Pettey, 25, were arrested on weapons and drug charges.

Blackward was released from the Camden County Jail on Wednesday after posting bail. McFadden and Pettey remained in jail Thursday on bail of $75,000 for McFadden and $100,000 for Pettey. All three are from Camden.

The stop was unusual in that a sheriff - rather than a police officer - made it. The Sheriff's Department typically just patrols courtrooms and executes search warrants.

A sheriff has the authority to pull someone over, State Police Capt. Stephen Jones said.

In fact, Billingham said, he regularly stops drivers around the county. Last week, he said, he stopped eight drivers - in Camden, Gloucester City, Audubon, and Bellmawr - for violations such as driving on the shoulder and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk.

Billingham said he doesn't carry a ticket book and just issues warnings.

"I always wanted to be a cop on patrol," said Billingham, who was a police officer in Washington Township for 25 years and became chief there before coming to the Sheriff's Department in 2007. He will retire at the end of this year. "That's why I still get the desire to do these things."

Yet this was the first car he has stopped that had two loaded guns, he said.

Billingham said the unmarked, gray Ford Crown Victoria he drives is rather obvious - "my unmarked car screams police" - and has lights inside that he activates.

During Tuesday's stop at 2:20 p.m. at Seventh and Linden Streets, Billingham was also wearing a polo shirt with the Sheriff's Department logo, and his badge and weapon were on his belt.

And perhaps he got the justice he wanted: The driver, he said, apologized for throwing out that plastic bottle.