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Alabama man finds drugs in car bought from government auction in Tennessee

MADISON COUNTY, Ala. – One Madison County family was in for an unwanted surprise when they opened the trunk of their newly purchased car. The deal they got at a government auction in Tennessee was full of heroin.

Rick Joyner tries to get all of his foster children their first car when they start driving. It was his foster son Tyrese Allen’s turn.


“I told him I could probably get him one for pretty reasonable and I did,” Joyner said. He found a working Ford Taurus for $500 on a government auction site, “The ones I look at are all drug seizures.”

Joyner and his son headed up to Nashville to pick up the car. Joyner made sure to speak with the officers, “It was full of junk and all kinds of stuff and they were like, ‘Whatever is in there, it’s yours.’ Cause I asked them if they ran a dog through it but they were like, ‘Nah, we got it all don’t worry about it.'”

They towed the car back to Alabama and popped the trunk. “We started pulling all this stuff out of the trunk and I saw this Walmart bag and I pulled it up and it had two bundles of something that was taped really, really heavy. I was looking at it and I thought, ‘Something don’t look right with this.'”

After making the discovery, Joyner called the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.

The Sheriff’s Office has the evidence and says that the bag contained about 2 kilos of heroin worth approximately $300,000.

Tyrese says this is a funny story he will always have to tell about his first car. “I’ll probably remember this for the rest of my life just because it was so unexpected it was just like a regular day and then out of nowhere, we find two kilos of heroin in our trunk.”