The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is charging 35-year-old Edgardo Rivera with felony drug possession with intent to deliver, among other crimes – including 11 counts of misdemeanor weapons offenses.
Representatives from the office’s Dangerous Drug Offenders Unit announced the charges at the new ‘Peace Park’ in Kensington on Monday.
The Philadelphia Police Department arrested Rivera this spring after observing him selling narcotics on the 800 block of West Venango Street in North Philadelphia. Investigators searched the property and found $19,000 worth of narcotics, $10,000 in cash and nine firearms. Three of the guns had been modified to be fully automatic.
District Attorney Larry Krasner confirmed to the crowd that Rivera played a role in a larger drug trafficking operation in Kensington. He emphasized that the number of guns recovered in this case made clear how dangerous the drug trade is to the larger community.
“For a very long time, as we look at the shootings that occur in Philadelphia, a very disproportionate number of them occur in the area of Kensington,” Krasner said. “And no one disputes that some of that is related to the drug trade.”
The investigation into Rivera took place during March and April. Assistant District Attorney Paul Riddell noted that the Dangerous Drugs Unit has historically been focused on long-term drug investigations that take months or years.
“But we heard from the community and we heard from law enforcement locally that they need more help and more assistance for these local cases, which impact the community every day,” Riddell said, “So in this case, we have expanded our efforts to investigate vertically and prosecute these cases all the way from the bottom to the top.”
Krasner also spoke about resilience, and community efforts to address “the trauma, the grief, and the suffering that have been caused for decades in Kensington by gun violence.”
The garden where Krasner and his team announced the charges is home to an art project produced by Mural Arts and RAWtools Philadelphia, an organization that collects firearms through buyback programs and repurposes them into household tools. The group held a series of healing workshops for Kensington gun violence survivors this spring.
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