A Hickory man has been sentenced to a decade behind bars following a serious weapons charge, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina Dena J. King announced yesterday. Kadeem Jamal Albright, aged 30, faced the consequences of his actions in court, receiving a 120-month prison sentence which will be succeeded by a supervised release lasting three years; this sentencing arrives in the wake of his December 2022 arrest for gun and drug crimes.
The sequence of events leading to Albright's arrest unraveled swiftly on the night of December 27, 2022, when Hickory Police Department officers, responding to a call about a hit-and-run involving a silver vehicle, located and attempted to stop that vehicle, as outlined in a press release on the Department of Justice's website; Albright who was the driver appeared intoxicated and was reluctant to comply at first but eventually yielded to the officers' demands. During the traffic stop, officers discovered over 9 ounces of marijuana, a loaded .40 caliber pistol under the driver's seat, along with 362 fentanyl pills and almost a pound and a half of the same substance, and what officers identified as a 'ghost gun', which was, in essence, a loaded short-barrel AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with a drum magazine stashed in the trunk.
Albright's prior convictions categorically barred him from possessing firearms or ammunition—a fact that added gravity to the discovery of the weapons during the traffic stop. On December 5, 2023, he accepted his fate and pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime and possession of a firearm by a felon, the Department of Justice reports. His guilty pleas precipitated the recent sentencing, ordering 120-month imprisonment terms to be served back-to-back.
Officials from both the ATF and Hickory Police Department have been credited by U.S. Attorney King for their roles in the investigation leading to Albright’s sentencing, indicating that the collaborative effort was paramount to the case's resolution, this sanction is a part of the larger Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative which aims to amalgamate law enforcement efforts with community outreach to staunch violent crime and gun violence to secure the safety of public spaces.
