Ex-Convict Sentenced to 8 Years in Prison for Selling OxyContin
Ronald L. Flemings, Jr. was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for selling OxyContin pills to a police informant. The gang member spent 11 years in prison for shooting a woman in cold blood in West Seattle in 1992.
He could have faced more than 15 years in a federal penitentiary for the latest crime, but U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman handed him an 8 1/3 term and ordered him to undergo drug treatment while behind bars, citing his history of addiction problems, his seriously ill wife, and his young children at home. The judge told him, "When you have a criminal history like this, you can't make any missteps."
Flemings, who lives in Tacoma, was caught in October selling 200 OxyContin pills to a King County Sheriff's informant who knew Flemings as "Black." As soon as Flemings handed the informant the pills in a chain-restaurant parking lot, the police arrested him. Flemings pleaded guilty in April.
Prosecutors say Flemings has a long history as a member of the Black Gangster Disciples street gang, and more recently has been a "sergeant at arms" with an outlaw motorcycle crew called the "Drama Boyz.”
In January 1992, when he was 21 and living in Seattle's High Point neighborhood, Flemings announced to his friends that he was "fixing to do some shooting." He then pulled out a .38-caliber handgun and opened fire on an acquaintance, Verlinda McDowell, a 30-year-old mother of three, as she walked down the street toward her grandmother's house.
The slaying was highly publicized for its cold-blooded brutality. A couple days afterward, two of Flemings' friends attacked a witness who had fingered Flemings, beating him severely with bottles and a metal bar while calling him a snitch.
Flemings pleaded guilty to second-degree murder a few months later and was sentenced to 11 years and nine months in state prison.