A high-level deputy in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Criminal Justice was arrested Saturday evening for being in a car with a loaded 9mm handgun that had its serial number scratched off.
Reagan Stevens, 42, was with two men in a dark red Infiniti SUV when police caught up with them in Queens, where they found the loaded gun inside the glove compartment, the New York Post reports.
Police were searching for the car in connection to an alleged shooting — surveillance footage from nearby shows several shots fired from the SUV, sources told the Post.
None of the three in the car admitted to owning the gun, so the authorities charged each of the three with two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. The driver, 25-year-old Caesar Forbes and Montel Hughes, 24, who sat in the front seat, were also charged with carrying knives.
De Blasio’s office said that Stevens was immediately suspended from her duties without pay, Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, told NBC News 4. “We take these allegations very seriously,” Gallahue said in a statement.
The mayor’s office apparently removed Stevens’ biography from its website, but an archived version of the page says she works with de Blasio’s Task Force on Behavioral Health and the Criminal Justice System, a $130 million four-year program aimed at reducing “unnecessary arrests and incarceration.”
“Ms. Stevens spent 15 years implementing crime prevention, adolescent diversion programs, and alternatives to incarceration at the Kings County District Attorney’s office,” the biography said
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