Three NC men in SC jail for what was found in car during traffic stop, cops say

A traffic violation on Interstate 20 led to drug trafficking charges for three North Carolina men who were recently arrested in South Carolina, according to the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office.

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At about 11 p.m. Sept. 11, a K-9 unit’s deputy pulled over a vehicle near the 10-mile marker on I-20, the sheriff’s office said Monday in a news release. The car made an abrupt lane change on I-20, which put them in the proximity of a truck pulling a trailer and a violation for following too closely, the sheriff’s office said in an incident report.

The deputy made contact with the driver, identified as 35-year-old Goldsboro, North Carolina, resident Ryan Lassiter, according to the incident report. A “very nervous” Lassiter told the deputy he and two other Goldsboro residents — 33-year-old Ryan Oshea Hall and 49-year-old Tre-Lamon Applewhite — were returning from a trip to Snellville, Georgia, where they attended a party for “Muslim friends” of Lassiter’s cousin, the incident report shows.

The deputy asked Lassiter to consent to a search of the car, and Goldsboro man denied the request, according to the incident report.

While speaking to Hall and Applewhite separately from Lassiter, the deputy said they contradicted the driver’s story, the incident report said. That, along with the nervous behavior of all three North Carolina men, led the deputy to suspect there were illegal drugs in the vehicle, and he had police dog Mally conduct a free-air sniff, according to the incident report.

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The dog alerted to drugs in the car, prompting the deputy to conduct a probable cause search, the incident report shows. A bag containing more than 9,500 Ecstasy pills was found, and all three were arrested, the sheriff’s office said in the release.

All three were charged with trafficking in Ecstasy, and Hall also was detained because he was wanted out of North Carolina for dangerous drug charges, according to the release.

The trio were booked into the Aiken County Detention Center where each had a $25,000 bond set for the trafficking charge, jail records show. All three remain locked up, according to jail records.