When city police showed up early Wednesday afternoon in the 500 block of Locust Street to investigate suspected drug dealing, two men disappeared inside a house.
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One of them, later identified as 24-year-old Manuel Anthony Plaza-Rivera, came back out to talk to police and soon found himself under arrest.
Police responded to the area just after 1 p.m. and were checking two individuals they had detained on the street when Plaza-Rivera returned from inside a house on the block. He matched a description from a caller about four suspicious males on the block, police said.
Police said they subsequently found 47 baggies of suspected heroin and $700 in cash in Plaza-Rivera's coat pocket.
Plaza-Rivera, of the 700 block of East King Street, was arrested and charged with possession with intent to distribute heroin, a felony. He was committed to Lancaster County Prison in lieu of $100,000.
Neither of the two other men questioned was charged and police are not seeking the fourth man.
Since the incident was near Martin Luther King Elementary School and a playground, the charges against Plaza-Rivera were filed with a Drug Free School Zone enhancement, which mandates a minimum two-year jail sentence.
In a separate incident, a homeless man who had been charged with attempting three bank robberies was charged Thursday with a fourth, committed on Christmas Eve.
City police said Ronald Andrew Brown, 37, called a bomb threat into the Fulton Bank in the Manor Shopping Center on Millersville Pike about 10:15 a.m. Dec. 24.
The Christmas Eve incident forced the evacuation of the bank to a nearby store after a teller took an intimidating call. The Lancaster County Sheriff's Office investigated with a bomb-sniffing dog and determined there were no explosives at the bank.
Brown was arrested five days later on Dec. 29, minutes after police say he held up the M&T Bank in the Wheatland Shopping Center on Columbia Avenue. He also is charged with attempting to rob the PNC Bank on East King Street and the Fulton Bank on McGovern Avenue, both on Dec. 26.
All four holdups involved bomb threats, police said.
On Thursday, Brown was charged with robbery and making fake weapons of mass destruction and will be arraigned later, police said.
Brown committed his other three robbery attempts in person, police said, threatening bank employees with phony bombs he made out of trash. Police said he was carrying a bag of cash from his most recent heist when they caught him behind Wheatland Shopping Center.
Brown has confessed to the Dec. 26 and Dec. 29 holdups, police said. They did not say Thursday if he had confessed to the Dec. 24 incident.
Brown is being held at Lancaster County Prison, where he was committed previously in lieu of $250,000 bail.
Staff writer Chad Umble can be reached at cumble@LNPnews.com or 481-6031.
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