St. Paul police dog finds 9 pounds of meth under flower bed

An alleged attempt by a St. Paul man and woman to hide 9 pounds of methamphetamine in a freshly planted flower bed was thwarted when a police dog named Sarik sniffed out the drugs.

"Sarik indicated the presence of narcotics in an area between the house and the garage where officers noted freshly dug dirt and recently planted flowers," according to charges filed Tuesday in Ramsey County District Court.

Raul Mejia-Lopez, 40, and Adriana Aguilar Gonzalez, 27, were each charged with one count of first-degree drug sale and first-degree drug possession.

There were other indicators that all wasn't as it seemed: A posthole digger at the scene had fresh dirt on it and police recovered a receipt for newly purchased flowers.

According to the complaints: Police executed a search warrant at the home on E. Acker Street on Saturday. Police forced the door open and found Mejia-Lopez and Gonzalez inside.

Sarik led police to the flower bed area.

"Officers located a posthole digger in the garage that had been purchased by Mejia-Lopez on October 7, 2016," the charges said. "The posthole digger still had fresh, damp dirt on it."

They found nine individually sealed Tupperware-type containers in the cooler, each containing about a pound of suspected drugs that tested positive for methamphetamine.

Inside the home, police found paperwork and multiple permanent resident cards with the suspects' pictures but different names and dates of birth, multiple Social Security cards with different numbers and name variations for the suspects and fake Minnesota driver's licenses, the charges said.

In August, Sarik, the department's oldest police K-9, helped return a lost 3-year-old boy to his home by following his scent from where he was found to his house several blocks away.

Chao Xiong • 612-270-4708