Known Wooster drug dealer gets 8 years in federal prison for loaded handgun

A Wooster man was sentenced to seven years in federal prison recently after he was found with a firearm on his person, despite being a felon.

Derrick Knapik, 30, 743 Spink St., was sentenced Oct. 17 after he pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing a firearm while under disability.

Knapik was the subject of multiple search warrants at residences he lived out of on Spink Street and at 659 Pittsburgh Ave. over a months-long stretch early in 2017.

Medway Drug Enforcement Agency Director Don Hall said investigators executed search warrants twice at each location between January to March this year.

On Jan. 31, the second warrant served at the Spink Street house, a loaded Raven Arms .25-caliber semi-automatic handgun was found in a bedroom where Knapik’s belongings were located. He was not at the house when the warrant was served. 

Knapik, who has connections to drug dealers in Cleveland, was arrested twice more this year.

First, he was arrested in February following a traffic stop at the intersection of Liberty and Bever streets with more than $3,000 in cash on him. He claimed the cash was winnings from gambling.

A search warrant was executed at the house on Pittsburgh Avenue that same day and yielded more evidence of drug dealing such as a Percocet pill, a “ton of syringes,” Hall said, and money ledgers, a crack pipe and digital scale with suspected heroin and fentanyl residue on it.

Then, after a bonding agency posted his cash bond and was released, law enforcement obtained search warrants for both residences and simultaneously searched them for drugs.

At the Pittsburgh Avenue apartment, suspected heroin, cash, syringes and a digital scale was found, along with Knapik.

“That name obviously is known to us and probably many in the community,” Hall said previously of Knapik, whose brother — Nicholas Knapik, 33 — was arrested during a search warrant at Brookside Drive that yielded drugs and a loaded semi-automatic handgun.

Nicholas Knapik was sentenced in August to four years in prison following that case, plus three other pending drug cases.

Reporter Steven F. Huszai can be reached at 330-287-1645 or shuszai@the-daily-record.com.

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