When your car is stolen, you can’t always expect to get it back. And if you are lucky enough to be reunited, you might then expect that a few things could be missing — nice electronics, your collection of road trip CDs featuring cool jams from the ’90s, etc. But in the case of a Calgary woman whose stolen car was returned to her recently by police, she was definitely surprised to find her missing vehicle had a few things it didn’t have when it went missing, including drugs, weapons and other illicit items.

She says cops didn’t do a very thorough job of searching her vehicle before it was returned to her, reports CTV News: the thieves left cocaine, identification, a crack pipe and guns inside the car.

Her car was stolen from an alley behind her home last week, and she was relieved to hear a few days later from police that they’d located her car and she could pick it up after the forensic unit had looked through it.

But as soon as she got in the car, she spotted a piece of paper in the cup holder and pulled it out — and out popped a bag of cocaine.

“And I went to the impound guy, ‘Is this normal? Like, what do I do with this?’ He was like, ‘Just throw it on the ground, throw it on the ground!'” she told CTV. So, she did.

The car kept coughing up more stuff that hadn’t been there before: She says she found a crack pipe in the backseat, four pieces of identification in the glovebox, a knife in the front passenger door and a lead pipe near the floor mat.

She called the police and an officer removed the evidence that had apparently been missed before. After the vehicle was towed to a repair shop, however, she says she spotted the butt of a gun under the seat.

“At this point, I can’t tell if it’s real or fake, but all I know is my hands have been on too many illegal things in the past 24 hours and I didn’t want any more,” she said.

The gun turned out to be a pellet gun, but she’s still angry: she’s filed a complaint with the professional standards section of the Calgary police service, and says she hopes it will keep this kind of thing from happening to other people.

“I’m trying to make enough noise so that hopefully maybe it’ll affect that one officer or even anyone in their day-to-day operations,” says Pickering. “Think of the tax dollars that could’ve been saved if they had just given it 10 minutes more than they did.”

‘Is this normal?’: Impounded car returned with gun, drugs inside [CTV News]

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