Georgia woman’s pet rat taken into ‘custody’ after traffic stop on I-75 nets meth and weed
The pet rat was riding in a new Dodge pickup weaving down Interstate 75.
After tailing the truck, which had three people inside, and pulling it over north of Forsyth, a sheriff’s deputy noticed the rodent perched on a passenger’s lap.
“It was kind of a surprise,” recalled the deputy, Monroe County sheriff’s Sgt. Kevin Williams. “I wasn’t expecting to see a large rat.”
The 6-inch-long, cream-colored critter named Fang soon found himself in a most-human predicament: Who’s gonna rat?
No one, it turned out.
In the pickup, the cops allegedly found a small silver case of methamphetamine, a glass jar of marijuana, some syringes and a half-smoked joint. But neither the driver nor her passengers seemed to know whose drugs they were.
The driver, 30, from Madison, was so nervous her hands shook. According to a report of the Dec. 1 incident, “her stomach was quivering” in the moments before the truck, a rental, was searched by a drug-sniffing dog named Zibi.
In the end, the woman and her two human passengers were jailed on drug charges.
Fang, the rat, was corralled in a box and taken to an animal shelter.
“I did not touch it,” Williams, the deputy, said of the rat.
Before Fang left the scene, his owner, the woman who’d been driving, mentioned that Fang was sick, possibly suffering from pneumonia.
She said Fang was on antibiotics, ibuprofen, an inhaler.
“I was kind of dumbfounded,” the deputy said.
The woman’s family showed up at the shelter and claimed Fang the next day.
The woman, being held in lieu of $5,000 bond, was still in jail a week later.
