A New Kensington woman has been charged with drug trafficking after police say she had bags of crack and heroin stuffed into her pants when the car she was in pulled over.
Emily Grace Hock, 39, of the 200 block of Glenview Drive was charged with two counts of drug possession and four drug-related misdemeanors.
Hock was being held in the Westmoreland County Jail in lieu of $25,000 cash bail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled before U.S. District Judge Frank J. Pallone Jr. on June 22.
A New Kensington patrol officer wrote in a criminal complaint that he was on patrol shortly before 8:30 p.m. on April 27 when he saw a brown Lexus pull into Freeport Street from Sheetz without signaling.
The car stopped after the driver changed lanes without signaling while on Route 366 as it turns onto Tarentum Bridge Road near Marlboro Drive.
The driver, who police say is known to sell drugs, did not know the name of the man in the front passenger seat and mixed up the names of the two women sitting in the back. He told police he was driving from the Parnassus area in New Kensington to a bar in Tarentum and that he was “just the driver,” the complaint said.
The officer got permission for a police dog to search the car, but all that was found was an open bottle of alcohol under the passenger seat that the driver said had been left by a previous passenger.
While the three passengers were in custody during the dog search, an officer spotted a crack glass pipe on the ground near one of the women. He admitted it belonged to him, but denied having any drugs.
However, she told the officer that Hock had drugs “on her,” the complaint said.
Stuffing is the street term for swallowing packages of drugs or placing them in body cavities to avoid police detection.
Police said Hock began to cry when an officer told her he suspected she was carrying drugs. She said “it’s not in me” before pulling two knotted plastic bags out of her pants.
One of the bags had a large amount of suspected crack cocaine inside, police said, and the other had five bundles of suspected heroin.
A package of heroin typically has eight to ten seal bags of the drug, according to the US Department of Justice.
Police did not specify in the complaint how much suspected crack cocaine was seized from Hock.
Tony LaRussa is a staff writer for the Tribune-Review. You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter .
