The car had been seized as part of a drugs bust and when dad Rick Joyner asked if it had been thoroughly checked by sniffer dogs he was told by police that it was clean
A dad who wanted to but a cheap first car for his son accidentally ended up buying him £220,000 worth of drugs as well.
Rick Joyner, from Madison County Alabama, had a budget of a few hundred dollars to buy an old banger for his foster son Tyrese Allen.
He thought he’d get the most bang for his buck buying something from a government auction of property that had been seized by police. And he was right.
The Ford Taurus he sought at a Tennessee government auction set him back $500 (about £370).
“I told him I could probably get him one for pretty reasonable and I did,” Rick said. “The ones I look at are all drug seizures.”
Rick and Tyrese drove up to Tennessee to collect the car. When they arrived, Rick made a point of chatting to the police officers running the auction, saying: “It was full of junk and all kinds of stuff and they were like, ‘Whatever is in there, it’s yours.’
“Because I asked them if they ran a [sniffer] dog through it but they were like, ‘Nah, we got it all don’t worry about it.’”
It wasn’t until they got home to Alabama that Rick opened up the Taurus’s boot and had a look inside, he told local news station WHNT.
“We started pulling all this stuff out of the trunk and I saw this Walmart bag and I pulled it up and it had two bundles of something that was taped really, really heavy.,” said Rick.
He added: “I was looking at it and I thought, ‘Something don’t look right with this.’”
He called his local sheriff’s office, and was told the packages contained heroin with a street value of around $300,000 (roughly £220,000). An update from the sheriffs later revealed that further analysis had suggested the substance may not be pure heroin, but some other, unknown drug.
Tyrese told reporters: “I’ll probably remember this for the rest of my life just because it was so unexpected it was just like a regular day and then out of nowhere, we find two kilos of heroin in our trunk.”
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