PORT ANGELES — A Port Angeles man will join his father in the state prison system as a result of the same 2018 drug-related incident.
Tommy Lee Cook Jr. was sentenced last Wednesday to 6½ years after pleading guilty in Clallam County Superior Court to single counts of possession of a controlled substance with a firearm enhancement and delivery of a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of two designated Quileute School District bus stops.
Cook, 29, also pleaded guilty to two counts of bail jumping.
His father, Tommy Lee Cook Sr., 57, was sentenced Dec. 11 to 5.3 years — 64 months — after pleading guilty to heroin possession with intent to deliver.
The father is serving his sentence as a minimum-security-level inmate at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, a state Department of Corrections spokesman said Friday.
Father and son, both of whom have extensive criminal histories according to court documents, were arrested June 28 at Tommy Cook Sr.’s Forks property on the 800 block of South G Street, where Tommy Cook Jr. had parked his motor home.
According to court documents, OPNET had developed probable cause that the younger Cook was selling heroin for cash and trading it for benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that acts as sedative which includes Valium, from the motor home, according to court documents.
OPNET officers and members of the State Patrol SWAT team arrested Cook Jr. at the motor home. A search warrant turned up digital scales, and a semiautomatic pistol that he was not allowed to possess because of a prior domestic-violence conviction.
A subsequent search warrant executed on Tommy Cook Sr.’s home yielded 62 grams — more than two ounces — of suspected heroin, $2,750 in cash and two sets of digital scales.
The heroin was valued at $200 a gram, or $12,400.
The father claimed he was an addict but not a dealer and that the heroin belonged to his son, according to court records.
The son said he had obtained drugs from his father in the past but that his father no longer sold drugs.
A SWAT team was requested due to Tommy Cook Jr.’s history of violent behavior including convictions for making threats and engaging in multiple assaults, according to court documents.
He was arrested July 13 at a U.S. Forest Service’s Klahowya Campground west of Port Angeles following a three-hour standoff with law enforcement authorities on heroin- and firearms-related bench warrants.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@ peninsuladailynews.com.
