‘Drug house’ frequented by students near college campus in NC is seized, feds say
Down the road from a coffee house on the outskirts of Western Carolina University’s campus in Cullowhee, North Carolina — just a few steps from a student center belonging to one of the college’s Christian groups — sits 129 Reservoir Ridge Drive.
After a more than two-year legal battle stemming from complaints about needles and dime bags on a nearby path to campus, the beleaguered residence now belongs to the federal government.
A judge ordered the forfeiture of 129 Reservoir Ridge Drive after prosecutors said it was “used to facilitate extensive drug activities,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina said Monday in a news release.
“The illicit drug trafficking that took place in the residence jeopardized the health and safety of the entire neighborhood,” U.S. Attorney R. Andrew Murray said in the release. “The drug activity was particularly harmful to the community because the house was adjacent to the campus of Western Carolina University and near a preschool.”
The investigation
According to Realtor.com, the house at 129 Reservoir Ridge Drive is about 1,700 square feet and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It’s described as a “sweet rental house almost on WCU campus” that sold for $150,000 in 2015.
The Jackson County Tax Collector now values the residence at roughly $130,000, defense attorneys said in court filings.
In addition to the nearby coffee shop, investigators said the house is located near an “active religious parsonage frequented by students and community members,” court filings state. The parsonage is Catamounts for Christ, a Christian student center affiliated with the Woodland Church of Christ.
A “parochial daycare” is also across the street, prosecutors said.
Law enforcement started looking into the single-family home in 2016, when prosecutors said neighbors began complaining about finding “bags, needles and other drug paraphernalia” in a wooded area near the house and frequent visitors — up to 50 in a day — who came and went in quick succession.
Similar items were also discovered on “a path that Western Carolina University students frequented as they traveled to (the) residence to purchase drugs,” according to court filings.
Prosecutors would later say the homeowner, Mark Loren Miller, sold “illegal drugs to students at Western Carolina University” — an allegation defense attorneys disputed.
Law enforcement subsequently set up a series of drug deals at the residence with a confidential informant in late 2017 and early 2018, according to court filings. During that time, prosecutors said Miller sold the informant marijuana and LSD — including a pound of weed for $2,460 in December 2017.
Agents searched the house on May 1, 2018, and recovered drug paraphernalia, guns, scales, illegal substances and more than $14,000 in cash, court filings state.
Miller was arrested, and the forfeiture case against his house was put on hold.
‘Unconstitutionally extreme punishment’
Miller pleaded guilty to several stage charges — including maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of harboring or selling controlled substances — in June 2019, according to court filings. Prosecutors moved in on the house two months later.
In court documents opposing the government’s bid for forfeiture, defense attorneys contested prosecutors’ portrayal of Miller as “an attempt to paint (him) in the most unflattering light possible.”
Miller also denied selling drugs to students and the number of purported “visitors” he entertained on any given day.
“The government knows that forfeiture of Miller’s personal residence is an unconstitutionally extreme punishment for three relatively small sales of controlled substances, and therefore, the government felt the need to bolster its case by alleging other crimes which did not occur and by impugning Miller’s reputation with these unproven and false allegations,” court filings state.
Defense attorneys argued Miller had “already been severely punished for his crimes” when a state court judge sentenced him to between two and three years in prison and seized more than $80,000 in cash and cars.
“When he comes out of prison, he will be a convicted felon, with all the collateral consequences that attach to that status,” they said in court filings. “To also take from him his residence would be nothing but pure meanness and the very definition of ‘grossly disproportional to the gravity’ of his offenses.”
But a U.S. district judge in Asheville disagreed, siding instead with prosecutors in an Oct. 2 order mandating the immediate forfeiture of 129 Reservoir Ridge Drive, court filings show.
