ROCK HILL, S.C. — Police, drug agents and prosecutors don't remember ever seeing someone so young charged with felony drug trafficking.
A Rock Hill police officer on patrol stopped two kids on a dirt bike in the Southland Park neighborhood off Mount Holly Road Tuesday night.
They searched a 15-year-old’s backpack and found several .22-caliber bullets and oxycodone pills, some wrapped in a baggie and many more in a pill bottle.
“Anytime you see someone that young, or a teenager of any age with bullets, you wonder what they've been up to," Rock Hill Police Capt. Mark Bollinger said.
It's not clear what first drew the officer's attention.
According to the police report, the officer saw the two boys on a dirt bike driving through the intersection at Saluda Street at Mount Holly Road and followed them to Winchester and Pearson drives, where the teens stopped.
"There was three carloads of policemen and there was a dirt bike, laying over there," witness John Thorne said. "I didn't know what they were doing."
Police said one teen took off running through the neighborhood and the other stayed with the bike
Officers soon realized there was more going on.
The opioid in oxycodone is as powerful as heroin and highly addictive. There were enough pills to charge the teenager with felony drug trafficking.
The 15-year-old was released to a parent and will appear in family court on the trafficking charge.
"Fifteen years old, selling drugs? Good God almighty," Thorne said.
The second teen on the dirt bike, who ran from the scene, has not been caught.
Police have not said where the teens got the pills.
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