Drug Bust: Mom Makes a Good Bad Cop as East High Guy Goes Down

An alert member of the school staff and tough-enough police work put a Wauwatosa East High student in no position to deny he was in possession of pot.

But it took Mother's stink-eye to get him to admit that he was an active drug dealer, and maybe the biggest at the school by his own account.

At 8:51 last Monday, school administrators and police were alerted by a teacher at East that one of her students "reeked like a controlled substance," according to police reports.

The school police resource officer went to the classroom to fetch him, and he, too, smelled a strong odor of marijuana.

A search of his person and backpack turned up nothing, though. The boy claimed he had picked up the smell of marijuana from others who were smoking it, although he wouldn't name them.

The boy said his car was parked on 73rd Street, which the officer noted was farther away than most students park for school – as if, perhaps, to avoid the occasional K9 drug-sniff patrol.

But the boy refused to consent to a search of his vehicle.

No matter, the officer went out and looked through its windows. There, in plain sight, was a pot pipe – and that was enough to establish probable cause for a search without permission.

They brought the student out in handcuffs to watch, and soon found multiple "roaches," a digital scale, plastic bags and a Hillshire Farms deli meat container with about half an ounce of marijuana in it.

The boy first claimed it wasn't his, then admitted it was but assured officers that it was all for his personal use – the scale, he said, was to carefully measure out and keep track of how much he himself was smoking, nothing more.

He maintained that stance throughout a lengthy police interview at the the station. Getting nowhere further with him, police called his mother and asked her to pick him up.

However, when she arrived, police said, "his demeanor changed." He suddenly became cooperative, the officer said, and consented to a search of his phone – which his mother rather insisted upon.

Officers found nothing of evidence on the phone but admitted without prompting that he deleted his messages daily.

Then, under the stern direction of his mother, the boy agreed to a second interview, and this time he told in exacting detail how he had been buying and selling drugs for several years.

He reeled out a complex strategy whereby he bought so much marijuana at a shot, sold just so much at such-and-such a profit, giving him money to spend and still enough pot to keep to get high daily.

He estimated he was selling to about 15 to 25 people daily, in and out of school, getting plenty of weed for personal use and still clearing around $800 a month in profit.

"I'm not gloating," he said, "but I'm one of the most popular dealers," not only in Wauwatosa but beyond.