Tierra Tocorra Hill and the backpack a 3-year-old was wearing that allegedly contained more than 2 pounds of cocaine (Mobile County Sheriff’s Office)
A 35-year-old woman in Alabama is accused of using a 3-year-old child to help her traffic hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal narcotics after authorities allegedly found the little boy carrying around about 4.5 pounds of cocaine in his little Nike backpack.
Tierra Tocorra Hill was taken into custody over the weekend and charged with one count each of trafficking cocaine, second-degree marijuana possession and tampering with physical evidence, as well as four counts of chemical endangerment of a child, authorities announced.
According to a news release from the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, a “reliable confidential source” informed investigators that a woman named Tierra Tocorra Hill had been keeping “a large amount of narcotics at a known location.” This led the sheriff’s Narcotics Team to set up a surveillance squad outside of Hill’s home in the 1900 block of Harvey Court in Mobile, Alabama.
The surveillance unit watched as Hill left the home and tracked her vehicle before conducting a traffic stop a short while later. During a search of the vehicle, detectives said they recovered about 1.5 kilograms — over 3.3 pounds — of cocaine in the car. A “small amount” of marijuana and a handgun were also recovered during the vehicle search, the sheriff’s office said.
Investigators obtained and execute a search warrant on Hill’s Harvey Court home where investigators say four children — ages 3, 8, 10, and 15 — were found inside unattended. That is when authorities say they came across the toddler wearing a blue Nike backpack. Inside the bag, detectives allegedly found about 2 kilograms of cocaine, which is roughly 4.4 pounds.
A second backpack that was not being worn by any of the children allegedly contained about one kilogram of cocaine as well as two handguns.
Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch upbraided Hill for leaving four juveniles unattended in a home with deadly weapons and narcotics, all of which he said “were accessible to the minor children at that time.”
“It is absurd how reckless this situation was,” he said in a statement. “There was a total disregard for the law and the children’s well-being.”
The sheriff’s office said that the narcotics had a street value of about $450,000.
Burch added some additional thoughts in an interview with Mobile CBS affiliate WKRG.
“I think she made a deliberate decision to ride around with substantial amounts of drugs and a firearm in her car and leave her children home unintended with even more cocaine and more drugs, so that’s a deliberate action, not a poor decision,” he told the station.
He also spoke to the fact that a toddler was allegedly found lugging around more than $100,000 in cocaine.
“It’s safe to say the 3-year-old probably didn’t put the drugs in the backpack,” Burch said. “Each kilo is 2.2 pounds and they commonly refer to that as a brick, so you got two bricks in the backpack being worn by a three-year-old.”
