Jury duty has turned into a serious drag for one teacher at the Williamsburg School of Architecture and Design. But that is what happens when you (allegedly!) try and bring 18 small bags of heroin into a courthouse. Like cellphones in school, you really gotta leave that stuff at home!
Here's what happened: 33-year-old teacher Damian Esteban of Manhattan was, until yesterday, a juror in the murder trail of Jamal Armstead who is accused of killing a teen on the Upper West Side in 2008. But Esteban was quickly replaced by an alternate after he set off the metal detector in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday. Because when a court officer checked the cigarette box that was setting off the alarm, she allegedly found the bags of H and Esteban was promptly arrested. Whoops! He is expected to be arraigned today.
Esteban has been a teacher at the Williamsburg School of Architecture and Design since 2007, but you wouldn't know it from their website which has already been wiped clean of him. Still, according to the Times, as of yesterday it showed, "that last spring he taught a class titled 'Global IV.' One of his homework assignments required students to write a brief paper saying whether they agreed or disagreed that 'Napoleon was the child of the French Revolution.'" We're guessing there was extra credit for focusing on Napoleon's love of horse riding.
