An Abbotsford man who was originally charged with 66 firearm and drug offences was found guilty on Wednesday of seven of those offences, while 10 other charges remain before the courts.
Corey Perkins, 29, was found guilty in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster of offences that occurred in April and May 2016: four counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking, two counts of drug trafficking, and one count of possession of a prohibited firearm.
Co-accused Caitlin Bransford, 31, was convicted of five charges – four counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking and one count of possession of a prohibited firearm.
The pair next appear in court March 15 to set a date for sentencing.
Perkins and Bransford were arrested and charged in May 2016 after Abbotsford Police executed 10 search warrants of cars and a residence or residences connected to Perkins.
Investigators seized numerous guns, $60,000 in cash, and large quantities of drugs, including more than 1,000 pills containing fentanyl, an opiate considered 100 times more potent than heroin and which has been connected to numerous drug overdoses and deaths in B.C.
The firearms seized by police included prohibited and restricted weapons, semi-automatic pistols and rifles, revolvers, a sub-machine gun and a sawed-off shotgun, as well as magazines, silencers and ammunition.
Police at the time said the seizure and Perkins’ arrest disrupted a major drug line in the city.
They began their investigation into Perkins starting in June 2014.
Following his arrest, Perkins was also charged separately from Bransford with another 39 charges – now whittled down to two drug charges (cocaine and fentanyl) and eight weapons charges – from Dec. 15, 2014 in Abbotsford.
The trial into those charges began this year and is currently before the courts. The case has been the subject of legal challenges by Perkins to have some of the evidence thrown out.
He claimed that eight of the warrants obtained by police were not valid, including search warrants on a storage locker, a Mercedes vehicle, a residence and a bars.
But the judge ruled that Perkins can challenge only one of the warrants – that involving the storage locker. The status of that court challenge – and whether evidence found in the locker was prohibited in Perkins’ trial – is not known at this time.
