A man was critically injured and a dog was killed when someone opened fire in Kensington on Sunday evening, authorities said.
The incident happened just after 10:45 p.m. in a lot on the 2400 block of Kensington Avenue, according to police.
Police arrived to find the man shot multiple times in the legs and abdomen, and officers transported him to Temple University Hospital, where he was placed in critical condition.
A dog was found dead in the lot, and officers determined the animal had been shot.
Police have not identified a suspect or a motive in the shooting, and they continue to investigate.
A United Kingdom man who was shot and killed while doing contracting work in Roxborough last week was a member of the so-called Traveling Conmen criminal organization and was not authorized to be in the country, officials with the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.
The man, 20-year-old Salis Hanrahan, was killed July 8 when George Barr, 75, fatally shot him at his home, according to police. Hanrahan and a group of men were at Barr’s home on the 400 block of Ripka Street that afternoon to work on the property, officials said.
According to the FBI, the Traveling Conmen, also known as Conmen Travelers, are a loosely affiliated group of men from the U.K. and Ireland known to overstay pleasure or tourist visas in the United States, where they travel between cities soliciting contracting work and defrauding property owners.
Police received an emergency call around 2:20 p.m. and arrived to find Hanrahan collapsed on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital shortly after arriving.
On Friday, police announced that Barr had been charged with murder and related crimes. They gave no motive for the slaying.
A spokesperson for DHS said Hanrahan was not authorized to be in the country, though officials were unaware how long he had been here.
Hanrahan was previously denied an electronic travel authorization after officials determined he was a member of the Conmen Travelers, a group recognized by the FBI as a transnational criminal organization, according to the spokesperson.
Members of the group have been accused of demanding large payments from customers that had not been initially agreed upon and convincing homeowners that their properties are in need of costly and unnecessary repairs.
And members of the group allegedly threatened the children of a New York woman that year when they demanded a $200,000 loan after failing to complete a bricklaying job at her home.
Within days, the members began showing off expensive jewelry, including a 10-carat diamond, on social media, according to a BBC News investigation.
Traveling Conmen often do not have authorized work permits and have been accused of leaving homes damaged or with incomplete work, according to the FBI.
It was unclear how Homeland Security came to conclude that Hanrahan is affiliated with the group.
Social media posts described him as a young father who shared an infant with his wife, Roseann.
Law enforcement officials seized nearly $6 million worth of crack-cocaine destined for Philadelphia as well as thousands of fentanyl pills in a monthslongdrug operation, authorities said Monday.
The seizure was the culmination of an 18-month joint investigation into several men who supplied or sold the potent synthetic opioid and other deadly drugs in the city’s Kensington neighborhood and elsewhere, according to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who said the cocaine seizure happened last week.
In all, Krasner said, law enforcement recovered 58 kilograms of cocaine with a street value of $5.8 million and fentanyl pills worth around $200,000.
The bust is the latest eye-grabbing effort to stem the flow of fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the city, and specifically to Kensington, considered one of the nation’s largest open-air drug markets.
The FBI targeted a sprawling criminal syndicate in the neighborhood last year when it arrested 33 members of the Weymouth Street gang, which was accused of running a 24/7 market for fentanyl and other drugs on the narrow block for nearly a decade.
In the latest raid, investigators were tipped off to the criminal activity in December 2025 when members of the Delaware River Port Authority Police pulled over 46-year-old Raabitah Reynolds as he drove back to Philadelphia from New York City.
After obtaining a search warrant for Reynolds’ vehicle, officers recovered a 9mm handgun and equipment for packaging drugs.
Later, when they searched a South Philadelphia stash house tied to Reynolds, they recovered 2 kilograms of fentanyl that was ready to be packaged, a gallon jar of PCP, various pills, and more firearms, according to Assistant District Attorney Stephen Girman.
Reynolds was charged with two counts of felony possession with the intent to deliver, two counts of criminal conspiracy, and related crimes. He is being held at the Curran Fromhold Correctional Facility with bail set at $500,000.
The haul was “a significant drug seizure in and of itself,” Girman said, but investigators did not stop there.
Reynolds’ arrest led them to one of his buyers, Khalil Dandy, a drug dealer who is accused of effectively controlling sales on a block at Kensington Avenue and E Street, according to Girman.
Dandy, 36, ran that operation from his home at a Center City condominium located near 12th and Chestnut Streets, Girman said.
Officers began visiting the Kensington block to conduct undercover buys, according to Girman, learning that Dandy was supplying fentanyl and crystal meth to street dealers in the neighborhood.
Dandy was arrested on March 18 and charged with possession with the intent to manufacture or deliver and related crimes. He was released from custody on bail as he awaits a preliminary hearing.
Meanwhile, investigators offered information about Reynolds to the DEA field office in New York, which led to the raid of a “pill mill” operating out of a Brooklyn apartment.
There agents recovered more than 20 kilograms of fentanyl that had been pressed into blue pills to pass off the deadly drug as oxycodone, Girman said.
These pills “are exceptionally dangerous, because people can take them thinking they are a regular prescription painkiller, and they can be filled with a fatal amount of fentanyl,” he said.
And as investigators traced Reynolds’ network, they learned he was also involved in bulk cocaine sales that came from a supplier on the West Coast.
Those shipments were shipped to Philadelphia in crates to be sold throughout the region, according to Girman.
In early July, investigators intercepted two of those containers, and with the assistance of a K9 unit, recovered a total of 58 kilograms of cocaine from within.
They arrested another Philadelphia man, 51-year-old Ephraim Ramsey, who had showed up to pick up the drugs.
Ramsey was charged with one count of felony possession with the intent to deliver and one count of criminal conspiracy.
And when Philadelphia police went to arrest Reynolds at an apartment in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood, he led them on a chase through a second-story window and into a back alley before being apprehended.
From a separateapartment on City Avenue, investigators recovered more than 2,000 of the blue fentanyl-laced pills as well as counterfeit Adderall, according to Girman.
In a third residencein Olney — a house being prepped to stash the cocaine shipments — officers recovered an AR-15 rifle with an obliterated serial number.
Krasner, touting the success of the operation, said he was pleased that law enforcement officers had targeted large shipments of contraband as opposed to targeting “young people with a small amount of drugs in their pocket.”
“This, in my opinion, is a much more important and much more effective approach,” he said.
It’s possible that nobody knows the stretch of Brandywine River that meanders through the heart of Wilmington better than Missy Morrissey.
Since her sister Susan’s battered body was discovered there nearly seven years ago, the West Chester native regularly returns to its banks, mulling a question:
How exactly did the 50-year-old Delaware County schoolteacher arrive in the shallows more than three miles downriver from where her car was found abandoned early on a July morning in 2019 in what authorities said was a homicide?
And how, she wonders, has the crime gone unsolved for all these years?
Susan Morrissey, who had been sipping wine and texting with friends into the early morning hours, left her Wilmington home just after 3 a.m. for reasons unknown, authorities said, and turned up dead in the river hours later.
Surveillance cameras captured Morrissey’s black Honda Civic as it left her home and headed to the gates of a nearby office building, where it was parked haphazardly and left unlocked with her cell phone and purse inside.
It was not until about four hours later that a construction worker discovered Morrissey’s body floating in the water miles away near the Northeast Boulevard bridge. She had died from blunt force trauma and drowning, the medical examiner found.
A photo of Susan Morrissey.Missy Morrissey
Investigators can’t say for sure how Morrissey’s body made it to the opposite side of town, though they believe she was alive when she entered the river and that she did not do so near where her car was parked.
“A friend refers to it as ‘the magic carpet ride,’” Missy Morrissey said of the distance between her sister’s car and where her body was discovered. “We just can’t figure anything out.”
It’s a puzzle that brings Missy Morrissey, the oldest of four siblings, back to the Brandywine each year, where she lays a bouquet of roses to honor her sister’s memory.
But this year, as yet another anniversary of Morrissey’s July 23 death nears, her family has begun to wonder whether after years of efforts to uncover the truth, her killer may never be found.
“On the first anniversary in 2020, I couldn’t have imagined that we would be sitting here in 2026 talking about this,” said Meg Morrissey Heinicke, the second-youngest of Susan’s siblings. “I would say time doesn’t heal all wounds. It is just as painful this year as the first year, the second year, the third year.”
Homicide detectives with the Delaware State Police say the investigation continues, but they have no suspects or motive, and there are no new developments in a crime that has divided the Wilmington and Chester County communities and drawn attention from true-crime podcasts and amateur sleuths across the country.
Missy Morrissey appreciates that people have taken an interest in her sister’s death long after it faded from the headlines.
Still, she and her family just want the crime solved.
A sister with flair
Susan Morrissey did just about everything with flair, her siblings said.
She grew up around West Chester and Wilmington and attended the city’s prestigious Tatnall School before heading to Georgetown University and later to San Francisco State, where she earned a master’s degree and began her career as an educator at a public school in a low-income Bay Area neighborhood.
Morrissey volunteered often, her siblings said, working with young people at a juvenile detention facility and devoting hours to an animal rescue, where she combed frigid Northern California beaches for stranded sea lions.
She was the first to read up on far-flung conflicts and the world’s injustices, and she loved sitting with a book on the beach in Stone Harbor.
It was she who recommended Noam Chomsky tomes and George Carlin stand-up specials to her less-enlightened siblings, they said. Everything from her CD collection to her handwriting oozed taste and personality.
The Morrissey siblings (from left: John, Meg, Missy, Susan).Missy Morrissey
“I don’t know how many people feel this way, but I kind of felt like the coolest person in the world happened to be in my family,” said John Morrissey Jr., the youngest of the siblings.
Morrissey eventually returned east and, after a disappointing stint of online dating in her 40s, reconnected with a former schoolmate, Ben Ledyard, an investment consultant and a regular on the Wilmington social scene.
The two soon wed, and each weekday morning, Morrissey drove to Pennsylvania to teach English at Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, Delaware County, where she worked for 13 years until her death on July 23, 2019.
Her brother now lives in Virginia but regularly returns home to the Brandywine Valley, where visits have begun to trouble him.
With each crossing of a bridge, each riverside drive, he said, a reminder of his sister’s killing lurks beneath the river’s surface.
“Susan liked true crime,” he said, “especially local crime.”
The mystery of her death, he said, is “exactly the kind of case that Susan would have been interested in.”
A body in the water
Even after all these years, Missy Morrissey still has the texts saved to her phone.
It was 12:29 a.m., she said, and the sisters casually exchanged messages while Susan Morrissey relaxed with a glass of wine on the back porch of her Riverview Avenue home.
She was a night owl, her sister said, and often stayed up late chatting with family or friends, especially during her summer break from school. Morrissey, she said, had been looking forward to attending a Rolling Stones concert with her husband at Lincoln Financial Field the next evening.
Phone records showed that Morrissey texted with friends and updated her storefront on Poshmark, an e-commerce site for secondhand fashion, until 2:45 a.m.
Then at 3:02 a.m., a nearby security camera captured Morrissey’s car leaving her driveway, according to Delaware State Police. It traveled around a mile through Wilmington to Walker’s Mill, a historic riverside property that had been converted into offices.
In the dark of night, however, detectives who later reviewed the footage could not determine who drove the vehicle to Walker’s Mill or see who left the car after it was parked.
Map of Wilmington, Del., showing locations in the death of Susan Morrissey, whose death seven years ago remains unsolved.John Duchneskie
What happened in the nearly five hours between the car’s arrival at Walker’s Mill and the discovery of Morrissey’s body downriver remains a mystery. Investigators say they have not determined why Morrissey would have entered the water that morning.
“She got her injuries close in time to when she died, and she died close in time to when her body was found” at 7:39 a.m., said Detective Daniel Grassi of the Delaware State Police.
He believes she may have entered the river anywhere from the Brandywine Zoo to the 16th Street Bridge, more than two miles downriver from her vehicle.
A water tower is seen from the top of the Northeast Boulevard Bridge in Wilmington, Del., on Friday, June 26, 2026. Susan Morrissey, a schoolteacher in Delaware County, was killed in Wilmington, Del., seven years ago this summer. Her body was found in the Brandywine River near the Northeast Boulevard Bridge.Aidan T. Gallo / Staff Photographer
Using data from Morrissey’s Fitbit device, investigators have pieced together the barest of timelines from that morning.
The tracker did not record Morrissey’s GPS location, so investigators cannot trace her movements, but they know she walked about a mile within an hour of her vehicle arriving at Walker’s Mill.
And at 7 a.m., the device stopped recording her heartbeat.
“I don’t know why she left the house at 3 a.m., and I don’t know what she was doing between 3 and 7,” Grassi said. “That four-and-a-half hour gap is a major issue with the investigation.”
What happened to Susan?
At her West Chester home, Missy Morrissey, 58, keeps hundreds of pages of notes and documents related to her sister’s case, making her something of an in-house historian of the family’s tragedy.
Since 2019, she has studied the river’s edge between Walker’s Mill and the Northeast Boulevard Bridge, poring over maps, interviewing store owners and strangers, and posting flyers seeking information about the killing near where Susan Morrissey may have been.
It is not only the lack of a suspect that vexes her. Police have not detailed the cause or extent of Morrissey’s injuries, beyond saying that they were traumatic.
Morrissey had been home alone that evening while her husband attended a screening of a documentary about the jam band Phish along with a friend. When he came home, Ledyard told investigators, he and Morrissey sharedhalf a bottle of wine before he took a sleep aid and went to bed around 11 p.m.
Delaware State Police Master Cpl. Michael Austin speaks in 2019 to brief reporters about updates in the death of Susan Morrissey Ledyard. With him were her brother, John (second to left), and husband, Ben (third from left).Katie Park/Staff
He said he had no idea what happened to his wife — a woman he told reporters was “the love of my life, my best friend” — until police came to the house around 9:30 the next morning to tell him she was dead.
Ledyard could not be reached for comment.
Two years after Morrissey’s death, Ledyard remarried, and in 2023 he was charged with assault for attacking his wife with a marble figurine and smashing her head into the floor after she asked him to turn down loud music on New Year’s Day.
He pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and was sentenced to two years in prison.
The charges brought fresh attention to the Morrissey case and fueled internet speculation that he could have harmed his former wife.
But police say he is not a suspect in the homicide and has cooperated fully with law enforcement.
‘A hope you desperately cling to’
Morrissey’s parents, Serena and John, died last year at 89 and 91 — without learning what happened to their daughter and without seeing anyone brought to justice for the crime.
John Morrissey’s death from advanced dementia came just two days after the anniversary of his daughter’s death.
“It’s been a tough year for our family,” said Meg Morrissey Heinicke, who lives in San Francisco. “This year’s anniversary feels particularly sad and painful.”
Yet there remains “a hope that you desperately cling to” that the case will be solved, she said.
Susan Morrissey with her nieces and nephew. Missy Morrissey
In honor of their sister, the siblings started the Susan Morrissey Foundation, which awards an annual scholarship to an Academy Park student for excellence in English, a small way of keeping her memory and love of the written word alive.
In their quest for answers, the family has promised a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
“I just want us to have some answers,” Missy Morrissey said of the family’s ongoing grief. “I don’t think that any of us can really process, or go on, without knowing.”
Anyone with information about the case is encouraged to call detectives with the Delaware State Police at 302-365-8441 or email daniel.grassi@delaware.gov.
A 75-year-old man was charged with murder and related crimes in the fatal shooting of a 20-year-old contractor at his Roxborough home this week, authorities said.
George Barr of Philadelphia was arraigned early Friday morning and was being held in custody without bail.
In addition to murder, Barr was charged with possessing an instrument of a crime and reckless endangerment in connection with the Wednesday incident.
Police said that is when Barr, of the 400 block of Ripka Street, shot and killed Salis Hanrahan as the young man and a group of workers were doing construction work at Barr’s home.
Officers responded to an emergency call there around 2:20 p.m. and found Hanrahan collapsed on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.
He was taken to Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital and pronounced dead at 2:45 p.m.
Police have not identified a motive in the shooting and continue to investigate.
Barr is being represented by a public defender and is expected to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on July 27.
An Oregon man on Thursday was ordered to spend 30 years in prison for fatally stabbing a beloved South Jersey veterinarian at the vet’s Cherry Hill home.
During Custodio-Aquino’s sentencing before Camden County Superior Court Judge Judith Charny, Anthony’s family members spoke tearfully of late veterinarian, who they described as kind, wickedly funny, and a devoted father to his sons.
Above all, they grappled for answers as to why Custodio-Aquino murdered Anthony that morning on his front lawn.
“You took all of the future moments that should have belong to him,” said Patricia Anthony Gershefski, one of Anthony’s sisters.
Anthony Gershefski said her brother was warm and sensitive, even moving his veterinarian practice just to be closer to his children.
The brutal nature of the crime confounds the family to this day.
In her career as a professional psychologist, Anthony Gershefski said, she has found “no diagnostic category for the deliberate destruction of another person’s life in this savage and grotesque manner.”
Kyle Bartsch, Anthony’s partner, said in a statement read by prosecutors that Anthony had filled their home on Sharrowvale Road with love and laughter.
His death, Bartsch said, leaves “a permanent void in the lives of those who knew him.”
While Custodio-Aquino’s attorneys had previously suggested that prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict their client of murder, they were mum throughout the proceeding.
In addition to the eyeglasses investigators linked to the Peru native, license plate readers captured Custodio-Aquino’s car entering and exiting Anthony’s neighborhood that morning, and forensic experts later recovered a sample of the veterinarian’s blood from the vehicle.
Prosecutors believe Custodio-Aquino traversed the country in a fit of jealousy that fall before killing Anthony.
He had previously dated Anthony’s partner, Bartsch, and once lived with the man in Haddon Township before the couple separated in 2021 after a domestic dispute, according to prosecutors.
Custodio-Aquino, given the opportunity to address the court, spoke so softly that Charny asked that he repeat himself.
Raising his voice, he said: “I do agree that the world is less than without Michael Anthony.”
He was sentenced to 30 years in a state correctional facility without parole. Charny offered few words on the ruling beyond wishing Custodio-Aquino good luck.
It was Henry Anthony, Anthony’s teenage son, who saved some of the most biting remarks for his father’s killer.
“Your life is officially over,” Anthony said, turning to look at Custodio-Aquino. “I honestly wonder what your reason for living will be for the next 30 years.”
A Northeast Philadelphia mosque was damaged in an arson attack early Sunday morning, authorities said, rattling the city’s Islamic community.
The attack took place around 2 a.m. at the Northeast Philadelphia Islamic Center in the city’s Castor Gardens neighborhood, according to police.
Fire crews responded to the mosque, located on the 1400 block of Tyson Avenue, and extinguished a blaze in the building’s enclosed front porch that morning.
The mosque was unoccupied and no one was injured, police said.
Fire marshals soon determined that the fire had been set intentionally. They are investigating the incident alongside the police department, which had not identified a suspect in the case as of Monday afternoon.
Meanwhile, local Islamic leaders are hoping members of the public will come forward with information about the attack, as they urge law enforcement to investigate whether the perpetrator was motivated by religious bias or hate.
“Our mosque is more than a place of worship,” said Masukul Islam Khan, the mosque’s president. “It is a welcoming community center that has served families, neighbors, and people of all backgrounds for many years.”
“Any act of violence or hatred directed at a house of worship is an attack on the values of safety, religious freedom, and unity that our city cherishes,” he added.
The local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved with the attack.
CAIR on Monday released a video taken in the aftermath of the blaze that shows the mosque’s porch damaged, covered in ash and soot.
The group also released surveillance footage that shows a man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt approaching the mosque, located outside the frame, before quickly walking away.
“An attack on any house of worship is an attack on the constitutional promise of religious freedom that belongs to every American,” said Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of CAIR. “It’s additionally saddening that this attack came just as the nation commemorated the 250th year of its founding.”
The Northeast Philadelphia Islamic Center was established in 2004 and has grown from a small place of worship to a bustling community where hundreds attend weekly prayers gatherings.
The arson comes as the mosque’s leadership seeks to construct a new, $2.8 million facility on a neighboring lot to accommodate an increase in membership.
In 2025, CAIR’s national office released a report documenting more than 8,600 anti-Muslim bias complaints from that year, the highest amount since the organization began tracking such information in 1996.
Jahylin Melchur, 21, is wanted in connection with two homicides and the shooting near the large North Philadelphia park, according to police.
He is accused of killing 45-year-old Martin Higgins in the park on June 20. Officers found Higgins on the bleachers of the baseball field around 10 p.m. that evening suffering from a gunshot wound to the torso, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Less than a week later, police said, Melchur shot and killed 29-year-old Sharef Holman not far from where Higgins was killed.
Officers responded there on June 26 just before 11 p.m. and found Holman suffering from multiple gunshot wounds near the basketball courts. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died a short time later.
And on May 29, investigators said, Melchur shot a 55-year-old man in Juniata Park, about two miles from the recreation center. The victim told police Melchur had attempted to rob him before shooting him in the elbow and torso.
Police are seeking the public’s help in finding Melchur, who they say is considered armed and dangerous and whose image, captured on surveillance footage at a Broad Street Line station, was circulated widely last week in an effort to locate him.
Law enforcement sources said the victims were found partially clothed, and that they were looking into whether they had met the suspect through a dating app.
Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore declined to address that aspect of the investigation in a news conference last week and said police were looking into whether the incidents were related to robberies.
Who were the victims?
Sharef Holman’s loved ones said the 29-year-old lived a life of faith and compassion, and that he was the life of any party he attended.
His mother, Danielle, said her son was beloved on both sides of his large family.
“He was tall in stature, and the children in our family loved to climb him,” she said. “The reason why I start there is because Sharef had a heart for the youth.”
Sharef Holman, a 29-year-old man who was shot and killed near the Hunting Park Recreation Center in June.Danielle Holman
Holman, who was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Samuel Fels High School in Crescentville, loved playing the saxophone and dancing, his mother said. He excelled in his school’s musical theater program, and once played Ebenezer Scrooge, the lead role in A Christmas Carol.
He had most recently worked at The Belvedere nursing home in Chester, where he assisted residents with recreational programs, and he tutored schoolchildren with the Greenhouse Project, a nearby Christian nonprofit.
For a time, his mother said, Holman struggled with drug addiction, and she remembers the pride she felt when he graduated from a rehab program two years ago.
“He had been fighting addiction for some years, and this last one was the one where he was the most successful,” she said, adding that her son’s progress allowed him to get an apartment of his own.
Danielle Holman said she and her family are planning a celebration of her son’s life this weekend. As they prepare to honor and remember him, she said, they hope police will find and bring their son’s killer to justice.
The family of Martin Higgins, who was shot and killed days before Holman, declined to be interviewed as they deal with their loss.
Higgins, 45, was a graduate of Temple University’s business school and worked as an inspector for the city’s Community Life Improvement Program, according to his obituary.
He had a “kind heart, generous spirit, and unwavering support for those he loved,” the obituary said, and he “was the person who showed up when someone needed him, always making time for family and friends no matter what was going on in his own life.”
Police ask that anyone with information about Melchur contact the homicide unit at 215-686-3334 or submit an anonymous tip by calling 215-686-TIPS (8477).
Thirty-one people were arrested for trafficking fentanyl and other illegal drugs inside the Camden County Jail, authorities said Wednesday, ending what they called a “complex and potentially far-reaching criminal enterprise.”
The investigation, dubbed Operation Paper Trail, began in October 2025, prosecutors said, and led to the arrests of suspects both inside and outside the jail.
“The takedown of Operation Paper Trail disrupted a dangerous network responsible for distributing illicit substances and facilitating criminal activity,” Camden County Prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay said in a statement.
“This operation not only enhanced public safety but also helped prevent further harm, protecting our communities and sparing countless individuals from the devastating effects of substance abuse,” she said.
The drug ring operations. prosecutors said, were run in part by Howard Dunns of Millville, N.J.
Dunns, 50, who was incarcerated at the Cumberland County jail, was a lead organizer of the drug ring, coordinating with Camden inmates who peddled fentanyl, synthetic marijuana, PCP, and cocaine at the facility, prosecutors said.
Dunns was charged with two counts of conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute a controlled dangerous substance. It was not immediately clear whether he had hired an attorney.
Two Camden County Jail inmates, Wilfredo Santiago, 31, of Vineland, and Kyle Jones, 31, of Millville, were also accused of participating in the scheme by selling illegal substances to other inmates.
That included at least 58 grams of synthetic marijuana, which investigators seized in March, according to prosecutors.
The men were each charged with one count of conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute a controlled dangerous substance.
The remaining 28 people were charged with drug crimes, many for possessing illegal substances.
Prosecutors said Santiago and Jones managed to sneak the drugs into the jail using paper that had been laced with the substances and marked as confidential legal correspondence between inmates and attorneys.
Detectives with the Camden County Department of Corrections learned of the drug ring in late 2025 after intercepting an envelope addressed to a 21-year-old man who was incarcerated in the jail, prosecutors said.
Detectives found that the supposed legal correspondence was inauthentic, and the letter later tested positive for traces of cocaine.
In addition to charging the inmate with a drug offense, detectives arrested the sender, a 32-year-old Camden man, and charged him with similar crimes.
He was later placed in custody in the Camden County Jail, and within months, prosecutors said, he had instructed an associate to traffic drugs into the facility through similar means.
A 39-year-old man was stabbed during a fight on a SETPA bus in West Philadelphia early Monday, authorities said.
The incident began around 2:44 a.m. when two men got on theL1 Owl bus at 15th and Market Streets and began fighting, police said.
The bus driver flagged down a nearby Philadelphia police officer for assistance.
After an unsuccessful attempt to separate the men, the officer deployed a Taser on the 39-year-old man, whom police did not identify.
While taking him into custody, the officer saw that the man had been stabbed. He was taken to Jefferson Hospital, where he remained in stable condition late Monday morning.
Investigators are looking for a the second person they said was involved in the fight and fled the scene.
Officers recovered a knife. Police gave no motive for the stabbing which remains under investigation.
