A man who was arrested last year for selling drugs out of his vehicle in downtown Eatonton will spend basically the rest of his life in prison.
Richie Solomon Burke, 51, formerly of Stribling Street, Eatonton, was sentenced by Chief Judge Brenda H. Trammell to 30 years, with 25 of those to be served behind bars and the remaining five on probation. He pled guilty on Aug. 15 to possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, trafficking methamphetamine, trafficking cocaine, and trafficking oxycodone.
“I am certainly very proud of the hard work Harry Luke, Chief Howell Cardwell, and Assistant District Attorney Allison Mauldin did on this case,” District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale said. “We’re just not going to tolerate this in Putnam County or anywhere else in the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit. I hope drug dealers coming into Putnam County and thinking about setting up shop will think first about Richie Burke sitting in prison for the rest of his life.”
Putnam County Sheriff’s Investigator Lt. Harry Luke and Eatonton Police Chief Howell Cardwell worked together to investigate the case for several months in the summer of 2022. Burke was selling drugs from his GMC Yukon Denali parked on the 400 block of East Marion Street.
Luke said when they went to make the arrest on Friday, Aug. 5, 2022, customers were literally standing off to the side waiting their turn to buy drugs.
“As soon as one made their purchase and started walking away, another one would start walking up,” he said at the time.
When Luke and Cardwell walked up to the vehicle to make the arrest, the first thing they saw was digital scales on the console of the SUV, and inside the console, they found stacks of dollar bills, “organized like a cash drawer,” Luke described.
During their investigation, the law enforcement officers learned Burke was a registered sex offender who listed his address as Horton Drive, but he actually lived on Stribling Street. He drove both the Denali and an older model Chevrolet Impala. After making the arrest in 2022, authorities found four pounds of marijuana, 200 grams of ecstasy, and half a kilo of cocaine in the vehicles along with $2,000 cash in the Denali and another $50,000 in the Impala.
Burke had a history of convictions on the same or similar charges from 1991 to 2010, according to Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills.
“He certainly deserved that and more,” Sills said of the sentence imposed by Trammell. “He’s a career drug dealer, the kind that causes so many problems in the community.”