West Naranja Drive
March 8, noon
A high-school drug dealer produced a pretty lame story about accidentally finding a Xanax pill, trying to pin suspicion on his would-be customer ... all while obviously super high, according to an Oro Valley Police Department report.
A security guard at Ironwood Ridge High School, 2475 W. Naranja Drive, told an OVPD officer he'd seen a group of kids in the boys' locker room gathered around a male student wearing a hooded sweatshirt. When the student saw he was being watched, said the guard, he moved as if trying to hide, at which point a Xanax bar—a large, scored rectangular pill usually broken into smaller pieces for ingestion—fell out of his hoodie sleeve.
Upon interview by the police officer, after being read his Miranda rights, the student said he'd accidentally found the Xanax on the bottom of an otherwise empty locker and, knowing what it was but not wanting it for himself, had offered to give it to another student for free. The school's administration, however, was pretty sure he'd been in the middle of trying to sell the bar to another young man when security walked in on them.
Although the subject strongly insisted he'd found the pill by chance, he made no effort to hide his familiarity not only with prescription pills (not prescribed to him), but with Xanax bars in particular, saying "the last time he had a bar was sometime before school started in August" and that "when he takes a bar it would be a whole bar, and that it makes him sleepy." Meanwhile, the reporting officer noticed "his speech was very slow and lethargic, he had a hard time focusing on things and appeared very tired."
Throughout his interrogation by the police officer, the subject's phone kept ringing and he repeatedly (unsuccessfully) begged to answer it. But once the officer showed interest in who was calling, the young man burst out that "his phone was private and (he) did not want anyone to look at his pictures." This made the officer decide to get a search warrant to seize the phone and examine its contents as evidence of drug dealing.
Finally the officer told the young man he was going to question the boy to whom he'd allegedly planned to "give" the Xanax. Asked if he thought the other student would have a different story, the subject replied, "I don't know, that dude's pretty sketch."
The hoodie-wearing student was arrested on a paper referral for possessing a prescription-only drug, then released to his grandmother. The officer hadn't yet seized his phone at the time of the report.
