Police officers pulled into Ruidoso Laser Wash on Mechem Drive one afternoon last week, but not to get their patrol SUV's washed and detailed.

They were armed with a search warrant that allowed them to look for methamphetamine, paraphernalia, scales, packaging or other evidence that drugs were being sold by a worker at the busy car wash, which is named on school bus schedules as a daily pickup and drop-off location.

Officers swarmed onto the property shortly before 3 p.m. on Thursday Sept. 8, at a time when neighborhood parents were waiting in their cars for the bus to drop off their children.

The worker whose name was on the warrant, Daniel Pena, was back at his job this week and said the idea that he was dealing drugs was "ludicrous." He also criticized police for upsetting car wash customers and even making one of the waiting school parents get out of her car as they prepared to search the site.

The officers were acting on information they obtained the previous evening after they stopped a Dodge sedan near Midtown for driving with no headlamps.

A search of that car and its four occupants turned up an assortment of contraband, including some methamphetamine which a woman passenger in the back seat, Angela Gaylord of Ruidoso, told officers she had bought from a man named Daniel at Ruidoso Laser Wash. The incident report said she told officers it was the second time she had obtained drugs there.

Pena lives in a small two-bedroom house next to the car wash at the same address. The search warrant executed last Thursday named him and said police could search his residence.

Police failed to locate the evidence of high volume drug trafficking that their warrant indicated they thought they might find, but they did report that they came up with some smaller quantities of marijuana and meth, a pipe and a grinder of the type used by marijuana smokers.

Pena told the News Thursday he kept a small amount of marijuana to help him deal with pain from an elbow injury, but he denied having any meth. "I don't use that stuff," he said, adding that methamphetamine does not appear on the police inventory he was given of items seized during the search.

But he did say Gaylord was a sometime girlfriend and came regularly to the house.

"I don't know why she would say those things about me," he said, adding that a pipe with drug residue found during the police search was hers.

Gaylord was arrested and charged after the traffic stop the previous evening for possession of methamphetamine.

Pena was charged following the search with drug and paraphernalia possession and given a date to appear in Magistrate Court next month. Police also served an outstanding warrant on another charge. And Pena said he now faces probation violation issues from a deferred sentence for contempt of court last April.

He observed sadly that he was starting to feel overwhelmed by his court problems.

"I guess that's why they call New Mexico the Land of Entrapment," he said.

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