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Calgary woman ‘shocked’ when stolen car is returned with drugs and guns inside

Photo from THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh.

Vehicle theft is, at the very least, a hassle. And it becomes even more troubling when your stolen car is returned to you full of weapons, fake I.D.s and drug paraphernalia.

So learned 26-year-old Calgary resident Courtney Pickering when she went to retrieve the 2014 Dodge Dart that had been stolen from an alleyway. With her purse inside the car, the crooks were able to empty her accounts using the PayPass function most debit cards now have.

Still reeling from the events, Pickering says she was stunned when she went to retrieve her vehicle from the impound lot.

Inside the car, which had been in police custody, Pickering found a knife and a large pipe. In her cup holder she found a small bag containing a white powder which she believed to be cocaine and a crack pipe on the seat where her three-year-old son’s car seat would normally be.

“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 Calgary.

Pickering told the Sun News she thought there must have been a mistake.

“My honest first thoughts were that the impound staff had accidentally called me too soon and the police hadn’t finished their investigation,” she told the Sun.

“Clearly items used for the purpose of a crime and actual hard drugs did not seem like something the police would release back to an unknowing civilian.”

After documenting the contents of the car on her smartphone, Pickering decided it best to leave the car in the lot a until an officer could go over the vehicle to make sure it was safe and legal to drive.

She told Sun News an officer took three minutes to look around her car in the daytime and told her it was good to go, causing Pickering to file a complaint with Professional Standards.

“I pulled out a men’s flipflop and noticed a hammer was also under there. As soon as I touched it, I noticed the butt end of a gun.”

The gun was not a real firearm, but a pellet gun.

Still, Pickering says she is more than disgusted with the practices and policies of the police, which has not released an official statement regarding the situation.