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Cops: Aspen man volunteers for jail, brings drugs along

A local man who’s been in and out of jail repeatedly on drug charges for the past 15 months voluntarily returned to jail last week and allegedly smuggled drugs into the facility, according to court documents.

Kent Muer, 40, showed up at the Pitkin County Jail on Feb. 28, revoked his own bond in a domestic violence and drug case from December 2015 and asked to be booked into the jail, according to an affidavit written by a Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy and filed Wednesday in Aspen District Court.

Muer was then searched and booked back into the jail.



The following morning, however, an anonymous inmate told a jail deputy that the evening before, Muer “emerged from his room and seemed to be ‘very out of it’ and ‘passed out’ to the point the subject was worried about Muer,” the affidavit states.

After Muer left his cell that evening to speak with a visitor, a deputy searched the room “and found a lip balm container filled with pills and an unknown white, powdery substance,” according to the affidavit.




The deputy looked up the pills on an internet database and discovered one was Clonazepam and the other was Trazodon. He also found white powder on a desk in Muer’s room and two white chunks “about the size of an apple seed” as well as a comb with powder on it, the affidavit states.

The chunks and the powder both preliminarily tested positive for cocaine, according to the affidavit.

Muer denied the lip balm container was his, though the jail deputy said he was the only one in the room and that cells are routinely checked before a new inmate occupies them, the affidavit states.

Together, the pills and the cocaine weighed 4.7 grams.

“(The jail deputy) said he believed the lip balm container was smuggled in by Muer and the items in the container were Muer’s as well,” according to the affidavit.

Muer has been a regular inmate at the jail since December 2015, when he was arrested for drug possession, assault and domestic violence after a violent incicent with his then-wife at an Aspen hotel. He was arrested last month for possession of drugs and paraphernalia, though those charges were later dropped by the District Attorney’s Office.

“Over the last year, many of my decisions have been horrible,” Muer told a District Court judge in July. “I’ve been mired in the horrible choices I’ve made in the last year. My actions have caused harm to others.”

jauslander@aspentimes.com

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