March SET target pleads guilty to drug charge

Sonia Cremeans, the subject of a hunt by the Carson City Sheriff's Office's Special Enforcement Team in mid-March, pleaded guilty to a felony drug charge Tuesday morning.

As part of a plea deal, one charge of conspiracy to violate the controlled substance act was dismissed. She pleaded guilty to a second charge of it. It carries a penalty of one to five years in prison. Her sentencing is scheduled for June 12.

Assistant District Attorney Gerald Gardner called it a "fairly standard" plea deal to avoid the expense and time of a court trial.

Cremeans was arrested March 16 when SET deputies used a criminal informant to buy drugs with a tracked $20 bill from her. They had been pursuing the deal throughout the evening, in which she led the buyer on a goose chase of locations to meet at. At one point, the informant even received a text message asking if he was bringing the drug cops with him to the buy.

Eventually, the informant made the buy and gave it to the deputies. During her arrest, Cremeans allegedly told deputies that she had sold fake drugs to the informant - a gross misdemeanor instead of a felony - but a field-testing kit gave officers enough confidence to charge her with selling methamphetamine.

Another deputy, non-SET but working with them on the bust, told Cremeans that he also had been making controlled buys from her for weeks.