"It's extremely rare that this happens at any business": Thousands of dollars of drugs found hidden in an amp by shocked Guitar Center employees
Thousands of pounds worth of cocaine and methamphetamines were found stuffed in a guitar amp after they were mistakenly shipped to a Guitar Center store in Gwinnett County, Georgia and found by shocked members of staff.
"Police say that the cocaine and the meth that they found stuffed inside the equipment was never meant to show up at the business," said WSB-TV news reporter Matt Johnson in the video below.
The police were called by the Pleasant Hill Road Guitar Center store staff on 17 July when they unwittingly found the illegal substances after opening the box with the combo amp that had a shipping address out of state.
"The location was listed as a return address so it [could be] returned to them," reported WSB-TV. "Investigators believe the drug dealers who tried to ship the drugs have done this before." Usually, a specialist police unit seizes suspicious packages before they can be delivered, using sniffer dogs to identify items that might contain drugs. But this amp slipped through the net.
"Police believe that there's no connection, no tie from any [Guitar Center] employees here to the drugs," noted WSB-TV.
"In this case we have employees who did exactly the right thing, said Sgt, Collin Flynn of Gwinnett County Police Department. "It's extremely rare that this happens at any business."
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Rob is the Reviews Editor for GuitarWorld.com and MusicRadar guitars, so spends most of his waking hours (and beyond) thinking about and trying the latest gear while making sure our reviews team is giving you thorough and honest tests of it. He's worked for guitar mags and sites as a writer and editor for nearly 20 years but still winces at the thought of restringing anything with a Floyd Rose.