ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 30, 1996 TAG: 9604010035
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
note: above
THEY HOPED to take a bite out of crime, but in a sweep of three high schools, the dogs didn't find much.
Bedford County sheriff's deputies and state troopers didn't find any guns or illegal drugs during their sweep of the county's three high schools Friday, but that's not to say they didn't find anything interesting.
At Liberty High School, two police dogs pawed and sniffed at a camouflage jacket left in a classroom the officers were searching.
The officers went through the jacket's pockets and found a pack of cigarettes and a glass vial with a rubber cap in the shape of a skeleton. Inside the vial was a viscous, foul-smelling red liquid that looked like syrup.
Eventually, a ninth-grader with a partially shaved head and chains around his neck was identified as the jacket's owner.
"What's this?'' Lt. John McCane of the Sheriff's Office asked the teen.
"Blood."
"Whose blood?'' McCane asked, a little taken aback.
"Mine."
"Where did it come from?''
"Me."
"No, where on your body did it come from?''
The sullen youth pulled his hands out of his jeans pockets and lifted his two bandaged pinkie fingers for the officer.
His parents were called. The blood was treated as a biohazard and disposed of.
The youth didn't say why he was carrying around a vial of his own blood.
The law enforcement officers received varied responses from students as they brought the dogs through the schools.
"I'm sure we'll get some mixed reactions," said Jefferson Forest High School Principal John Walker. "I'm sure there are some who feel their civil liberties are being violated, but there are also some who are pleased because they don't want anything to do with [drugs]."
The searches are part of what Sheriff Mike Brown calls his "Renaissance" of drug enforcement. "It used to be we were in the Middle Ages," said Brown. "In the past, we might have only checked a couple of lockers, and that would have been it. It's different now."
Senior state Trooper Ron Johnson and his 4-year-old golden retriever, Cody, ran through the classrooms Friday at Jefferson Forest, weaving in and out between desks. "Find it, boy! Where is it? Find it!'' he urged as he snapped his fingers over bookbags and jackets.
Cody is trained to sniff out eight odors, from gunpowder to ammonium nitrate, one of the chemicals used in the bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City last year. Last month, the dog found a gun and ammunition under the car seat of a high school student in Halifax.
After Cody finished in the room, Trooper Dwayne Tuggle ran through with Chief, a 7-year-old black Labrador retriever trained to locate heroin, marijuana and cocaine. After a quick sweep, Tuggle said, "We're clear here," and the kids filed back into their rooms.
"This is a major disruption to our studies," said one 12th-grader who wouldn't give his name.
"My friends are going to get in trouble," said Laura, an eighth-grader. (Bedford County schools allow reporters to interview students only if their last names are not used.) "Everybody as a teen-ager has a time of experimentation, and even if they're not doing it, they might have it on them.
"This is not one of those big inner cities where we have a big problem. This is Central Virginia, for God's sake."
Jawan, an 11th-grader, said: "I don't really think much of it. It'll get the school a bad image if they find something." However he added, "If people are distributing it here, it's pretty good, I guess, that they're looking for it."
Warrants aren't needed on school property to search an individual student or that student's belongings if there's probable cause to believe the student has committed a crime. The dogs are court-certified and anything that alerts their keen senses is considered cause for search.
Still, Virginia American Civil Liberties Union Director Kent Willis said that while the searches aren't illegal, "Dogs don't belong in schools. ... Students should be afforded essentially the same privacy rights as adults.
"Using dogs to search students at school is a dirty little trick to get around the constitutional prohibition against random searches."
But Detective Gary Faribault with the Sheriff's Office said: "I think these dogs are fantastic. They tell me you can take a firearm and scrub it with solvent or anything else, and they'll hit it just as hard because they're trained to smell the residue."
In the parking lot at Liberty, sheriff's deputies found a cap gun and a billy club in the back of one student's car. Having the cap gun at school isn't a violation of law, but having anything resembling a gun on school property is against school rules. The student now faces suspension or expulsion.
Another student's car was searched after officers said they saw something suspicious-looking inside.
"The only thing I have is cigarettes and dip," the student said. "There's nothing in here but cigarettes and stuff, and now my parents are going to see my car on the news."
Police didn't find anything in her car.
"We just didn't find any [drugs] today," Brown said. "It's the nature of the beast that in law enforcement you want to find drugs, but it tickles me to death that we didn't.''
This time, random classrooms were searched. Next time, Brown said, the dogs and deputies will go through every classroom.
"We'll take one school and search every bookbag, every locker and every car," he said. "We want this to be a deterrent and, hopefully, it will be. They won't know when we'll be coming back."
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. & 2. WAYNE DEEL/Staff Sheriff's Lt. Kent Robeyby CNB(rear), Trooper R.L. Johnson and Cody check a classroom. Trooper
Dwayne Tuggle works Chief around a student's car. color