Prison term is ordered for CHP officer

A California Highway Patrol officer was sentenced Tuesday to five years and eight months in prison for breaking into an evidence room and stealing more than 140 pounds of cocaine.

Joshua Wendall Blackburn, 33, of Murrieta pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine for sale, transportation of cocaine and commercial burglary.

According to the Orange County district attorney’s office, Blackburn, a six-year veteran, broke into the evidence room at the CHP’s Santa Ana station while on duty in the early hours of Dec. 21, 2007, stealing three duffel bags of cocaine from a storage locker. The cocaine was being held as evidence in a separate criminal case.

Just hours later, CHP officials noticed the evidence room had been broken into. Investigators with the district attorney’s office began interviewing all CHP officers who had been on duty at the time.

By 10:30 p.m.the same day, Blackburn confessed where he had hidden the cocaine: 137 pounds of it in a shed on his father’s property in Aguanga, in Riverside County, and the other four pounds in the attic of his Murrieta home.

Authorities recovered all of the cocaine, which had an estimated street value of $1 million.

Blackburn was fired shortly after the theft, said his attorney, John Barnett.

He was not a cocaine user and had no plans to sell the cocaine, and had stolen it because he was going through family problems and depression, Barnett said.

“It was a very unusual and ridiculous sort of act, and there’s not any real good explanation for his conduct,” Barnett said.

“It was an act of desperation brought on by deep depression.”

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