Photo: Mark Anthony Lewis
A Mountain Home man entered a guilty plea to charges in two open criminal cases in Baxter County Circuit Court Monday.
Twenty-nine-year-old Mark Anthony Lewis was sentenced to six years in prison by Circuit Judge Gordon Webb. The proceeding was conducted by way of video conferencing.
In late January, Lewis was reported to have gotten into a pickup truck idling in the owner’s driveway and appeared to be preparing to drive it away.
According to the probable cause affidavit, the owner confronted Lewis before he could get away in the truck.
Officers responding to the scene reported Lewis appeared under the influence of a narcotic. According to police, Lewis refused to communicate with them.
For some reason, Lewis had removed a tarpaulin from the victim’s garden and placed it in the truck. His only comment regarding the tarp was that it “needed cleaning up.”
The truck was estimated to be worth $10,000.
In the second open case, Lewis was charged with a number of offenses, including possessing various items of drug paraphernalia.
A Norfork police officer reported that on Feb. 2, he was observing traffic on the south end of the Norfork River Bridge.
He said he checked the license plate on an SUV in which Lewis was a passenger and found that while valid, it should have been on another vehicle.
After attempting to escape capture by the pursuing policeman, the SUV turned down a dead-end street and then into a private driveway.
At that point, the back bumper of the vehicle caught a guide wire to a power pole, breaking the pole and allowing wires to fall on the SUV.
When the vehicle came to a stop, the driver fled the scene, leaving Lewis in the passenger’s seat.
The Norfork officer reported asking Lewis several times to name the driver. He answered he did not know and had only been a passenger. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing governmental operations for not disclosing who was driving the vehicle when asked by the officer.
According to the police report, Lewis was a probationer with a waiver on file allowing warrantless searches.
The policeman found a number of items of drug paraphernalia in the SUV, along with six cellphones. A white powder residue on a set of digital scales field tested positive for methamphetamine.
Lewis was asked about the items found in the truck, but again answered he knew nothing about them and had only been a passenger.
The state dropped probation revocation actions in two older cases, both filed last year. Those cases stemmed from Lewis being stopped two separate times during which drug paraphernalia was found.
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