A suspiciously heavy looking spare tire on a sedan crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro turned out to be laden with 75 pounds of fentanyl-laced pills, Customs and Border Protection officials said Friday.
The find last Sunday was among three busts at the busy border crossing over the weekend. Officers seized big hauls of methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl with a street value totaling more than $9.1 million, the federal agency said in a news release.
The first discovery came at 4 a.m. Saturday when customs officers sent an SUV to a secondary inspection for a closer look. The imaging system found irregularities in the roof and a front quarter panel. Inside the sites were 57 packages of suspected cocaine, weighing about 152 pounds and worth an estimated $1.2 million on the street.
Several hours later, just after 10 p.m., a man driving alone in a commercial bus attempted to cross. The agency said it conducted what it called a “non-intrusive examination” and inside the bus’s air-conditioning exchange and a spare tire they found 60 packages, also believed to be cocaine. They weighed in at nearly 145 pounds. Estimated street value was more than $1.2 million.
The biggest bust came about 1 p.m. Sunday when the sedan tried to cross. The spare tire looked “heavier than normal,” the agency said, so the customs officer who spotted it asked for help. A drug-sniffing dog got a hit.
A search turned up 34 packages. Four contained methamphetamine weighing a combined 4 pounds. The other 30 packages carried 75 pounds of fentanyl pills. Together, the drugs were worth more than $6.8 million on the street, according to the agency’s estimate.
Customs and border patrol seized the drugs. The drivers — two women, ages 21 and 36, and the 64-year-old bus driver — were turned over to Homeland Security Investigations.
Mariza Marin, director of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, said in a statement the customs officers had done a “phenomenal job.”
