A former Raleigh police officer has been arrested in connection to a string of wrongful drug arrests between 2019 and 2020.
Authorities allege that, between December 2019 and May 2020, Detective Omar Abdullah used an informant named Dennis Leon Williams Jr. on controlled drug buys that led to Black men being arrested and jailed on drug trafficking charges.
Other WRAL Top Stories
However, lab tests showed the "drugs" Williams used in the transactions weren't illegal narcotics. He also failed to get the transactions on video.
Abdullah, 46, was fired from the Raleigh Police Department in November 2021 after being on paid leave for more than a year.
Abdullah is accused of framing 23 people over fake heroin deals and conspiring to target Black men for arrest. Some spent as long as five months in jail before their charges were dropped, and some lost jobs and were separated from their children because of the wrongful arrests, according to a lawsuit filed by their families.
Charges against the framed men were dropped, and Williams was charged in August 2021 with five counts of obstruction of justice.
Abdullah was arrested July 29 and charged with felony obstruction of justice days after a Wake County grand jury handed down an indictment, advancing the criminal case against Abdullah. He is scheduled to appear in court Monday.
Robin Mills, the mother of one of the wrongfully arrested man, said she isn't fully satisfied with the outcome.
"There should be more outrage than what I'm seeing," said Mills.
"A Black man doing that to fellow Black men? I have nothing for him. [I] could care less what happens to him."
In October 2021, Raleigh officials agreed to pay 13 of the men a total of $2 million to settle a lawsuit over their wrongful arrests.