IN FRATERNAM MEAM: FIRST GRADER'S CANDY TREATS TURN OUT TO BE CRACK COCAINE

IN FRATERNAM MEAM

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

FIRST GRADER'S CANDY TREATS TURN OUT TO BE CRACK COCAINE

A first grader brought dozen of little bags of crack cocaine to his Chicago Heights elementary school Friday and began passing them out to classmates, calling them "candy", officials said Sunday.

Adults at Lincoln School, which has fewer than 200 students in the kindergarten through eighth grades, learned what was going on through other kids and alerted the police.

"He lives in a household where apparently there's drug dealing, and when he sees these little bags of rock cocaine around the house, they're telling him it's candy", Chicago Heights Deputy Police Chief Michael Camili said.

A member of the household is believed to have stashed "40 bags of rock in his book bag...when he gets to school he finds them in his book bag, and he knows this is 'candy' because this what (people in the house) say it is," Camili said. "Then he sarts handing it out. It's insane".

'All bases were covered'
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was contacted. A DCFS spokeswoam had no information when contacted Sunday. The boy's guradians are being sought, arrests are "pending" Camili said.

Nobody apparently was hurt in the incident. But a person familiar with the situations was angry with the reponse by police, saying that "somebody could have been hurt because they didn't go around and talk to kids about it" and make sure all drugs were recovered.

However, Chicago Heights District 170 Supt. Dollie Heisel said that "all bases were covered, truly," and she's confident "anything that was given out was retrieved".

There was rumor -- which police could'nt confirm-- the boy who passed out or shown the drug to other kids at a community center in the south suburb Thursday.

The neighborhood around the school can be "a tough area", with street drug dealing sometimes visible from school grounds, school officials said.

While the district takes a tough stance on drugs, the boy, who is 6 or 7 , isnt likely to face discipline because he didn't know what he was doing. Helsel said.

"He was a darling little child; he had no idea of what he had. The ruckus, I'm sure, upset him", she said. " It breaks your heart to see that."

Camili was tunned by the case; "I've been here 29 years, I've never seen anything like it".

(abstracted from CHITRIB/by Robert Herguth/Staff Reporter)

posted by infraternam meam @ 4:08 AM

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