BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. — County and city leaders in Harrison County will be working together to try to find ways to address drug problems in their area.
“We’re going to meet this head on,” said Patsy Trecost, a member of Clarksburg’s City Council. “We’ve been fighting this all along across the state, but we’ve decided to do more now. We’re going to start working together.”
Those with Bridgeport, Clarksburg and five other municipalities were scheduled to be part of a meeting Monday night to talk about cooperation. That meeting was set for 7 p.m. at Bridgeport City Hall.
It came just more than two weeks after four people, including two innocent bystanders, were shot and killed at a Locust Avenue home when a Fairmont man allegedly went to the home in the early morning hours to collect a drug debt.
Sidney Muller, 27, is charged with murder for the deaths of Christopher Hart, 26, Todd Russell Amos, 29, Freddy Donald Swiger, 70, and Fred Swiger, 47. The Swigers were delivering newspapers at the time.
“We’re realizing as a municipality, we’re limited,” said Trecost. “We’ve watched our county, as a single entity, be limited and state as well, but we realized we’ve got to start tackling it from the top down.”
Senator Sam Cann (D-12, Harrison) said there are many factors that contribute to the spread of drug activity in a community.
“We need to learn to look at the whole economic picture,” he said. “The drug issues that we have and the abuse and the things that are going on, they’re all related.”
Both Cann and Trecost were guests on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”