The young girl believed that the bags of heroin were candy, started handing them to her friends and colleagues

Oct 7, 2014 11:46 GMT  ·  By

This past Monday, police officers in Delaware, US, were called in and asked to investigate a rather odd incident. In a nutshell, the task at hand was to figure out how it was that a 4-year-old girl had gotten her hands on as many as 249 bags of heroin.

Soon enough, it was established that the girl, whose named has not yet been shared with the public, had the heroin from her mother, a 30-year-old woman named Ashley Tull. Needless to say, the latter was almost immediately arrested and put behind bars.

A fairly unusual treat

The police officers in charge of investigating this case say that the 4-year-old girl found the 249 bags of heroin in a bag that she brought with her to daycare on Monday. Apparently, she believed that they were candy, which is why she started handing them to friends and colleagues.

Luckily, staff at the Hickory Tree Child Care Center in the town of Selbyville noticed some of the kids walking around with the heroin bags in their hands, confiscated them and alerted authorities. At the time the police was called it, daycare employees had no idea what they were dealing with.

When the police arrived, it was revealed that each of the bags the 4-year-old found in her bag contained not candy, but precisely 3.7 grams (0.13 ounces) of heroin. It goes without saying that whoever bagged the heroin this neatly was looking to sell it.

The mother is the one to blame

According to Daily Mail, the girl only took the bag filled with heroin to daycare because her own backpack had been ruined by her pet dog the day before. Hence, the mother told her that she could have her bag instead.

Following the incident at the daycare center, the girl's mother, identified as 30-year-old Ashley Tull, was taken into police custody. She now stands to be charged with maintaining a drug property and endangering the welfare of a minor.

Despite the fact that she was released on $6,000 (€4,780) bond not long after being arrested, the woman is not allowed to make contact with either of her three children, who are now looked after by a family member, media reports say.

A lucky escape

It is understood that neither of the kids who were at the Hickory Tree Child Care Center in Selbyville at the time the 4-year-old brought the heroin had the chance to give the drug a try. Thus, daycare staff and police officers collected all the bags before any of the children tried to eat the heroin.

Admittedly, several kids were taken to see a doctor at a local hospital, but their caretakers say that these visits were merely a precaution. For the time being, no health issues related to this incident have been reported.