Lack of curiosity leads to - Nogales drug suspects' lairBY Tim Steller The Arizona Daily Star
NOGALES, Ariz. - It didn't seem natural to officers who had swooped down on a Nogales home Thursday night that the people next door weren't curiously poking their heads outside.
So yesterday morning the officers did a "knock and talk" - they knocked on the door and asked for permission to search.
I Inside they found jackhammers and recently laid tile.
They were evidence of a second drug tunnel under construction next door to one officers had found Thursday night, said Lt. Eddie Cota of the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force.
The occupants of 170 W. Loma St. apparently had recently opened a hole in the floor and begun excavating a tunnel.
Cota, a Nogales police officer assigned to the task force, said they began covering it up when more than 40 officers appeared at 160 W. Loma.
"As we were working, they were working next door, too," Cota said.
For now, it is unclear whether the completed tunnel and the unfinished one are related.
But officers think the traffickers stopped using the finished tunnel after officers seized three drug loads
from vehicles leaving the house at 160 W. Loma.
The first seizure took place March 2 1; the last one May 2 1. They totaled more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana and 1,253 pounds of cocaine.
"When we were working the area, we knew we were being watched by them,- Cota said.
"The next door (tunnel effort) might have been a backup plan."
If it had been completed, the tunnel would have been the fourth found in Nogales this year.
In February, task force officers found two tunnels that led from homes a couple of blocks south of those searched this week.
See DIGGERS, Page 6A