Three women from Georgia who were visiting a Charleston, South Carolina consignment shop thought they were getting a nice gift for a child back home. But instead of the colorful, interlocking blocks, the child discovered $40,000 worth of methamphetamine inside the gift.
Bulloch County Sheriff's Investigator Jim Riggs told The Statesboro Herald that the three women purchased the box of toys while on a trip to Charleston, South Carolina. They didn't discover the three pounds of the drug inside until the child opened the gift.
Deputies say the women immediately took the drugs to the sheriff's office and turned the contraband in to deputies.
"They took it and gave it to a young child, who opened the box" and was likely very disappointed, Riggs said.
After a lengthy investigation in cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Agency, investigators determined the drugs had likely been accidentally mailed to an incorrect address, a tactic often used by drug dealers trying to obtain illegal substances online. The scheme involves sending packages to empty or abandoned addresses, hoping someone will be able to pick them up. However, the Post Office will often fail to deliver to those addresses because they are marked as unoccupied and bring those packages back to the post office. Those abandoned packages are then auctioned off to the highest bidder.
DEA agents believe the Legos package was sold through one of those auctions and that's how the drugs ended up at a consignment shop in South Carolina.
The women who turned the drugs in were not arrested or held responsible for the meth, authorities said.