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Woman serving time for fatal crash, pleads to drug counts

A former Carbon County woman, currently serving a state prison term for striking and killing a pedestrian while under the influence of drugs, was in the county court on Monday entering guilty pleas in two pending drug cases.

Jennifer Roxanne Coleman, 46, formerly of Albrightsville, now of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver and one count of alter/obliterate mark of identification on a firearm.

She was arrested on the first count March 6, 2015, by state police at Hazleton, when troopers used a confidential informant to make drug purchases from her at her then residence along North Shore Drive in the Indian Mountain Lakes development in Penn Forest Township. After one of the sales troopers served a search warrant for the residences and found cocaine and other drugs and cash.

The second arrest occurred on April 23, 2015, following a vehicle stop by Jim Thorpe police in the 600 block of North Street. Fifteen baggies containing cocaine were found in the vehicle.

Coleman is currently an inmate in the state correctional institution at Muncy, Lycoming County, serving a prison term of three to 10 years after pleading guilty to homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence in a fatal pedestrian crash.

Coleman was charged following a hit-and-run in which she struck a pedestrian and then fled the scene. The pedestrian, Vincent Smith Sr., 64, of Lehighton, was taken to the Lehighton hospital then flown to St. Luke’s in Bethlehem, where he died. The incident occurred on Nov. 8, 2015. She was driving a Ford F150 pickup, which she had taken without the owner’s permission. The sentence was imposed on Jan. 19.

Judge Steven R. Serfass, who imposed the sentence in the fatal crash, accepted Coleman’s pleas Monday.

Serfass sentenced her to serve 14 to 60 months in a state prison on the three new charges and ran them concurrent with the term imposed in the fatal crash.

He also ordered her to supply a DNA sample, get a drug and alcohol evaluation, zero tolerance for drug or alcohol use and pay court costs of about $1,000.