Police Raid Teacher’s House for Marijuana, Find Guinea Pigs Instead

(photokdk/iStockPhoto)

Last week police zoomed to the site of a house they suspected of being the site of a secret marijuana-growing facility, but it wound up just being the home of a Yorkshire primary school teacher with some friendly guinea pigs.

According to the BBC, a police helicopter searching the area for “hotspots” caught sight of a suspicious warm spot on the roof of the garage of 41-year-old Pam Hardcastle, who is a learning mentor at a nearby primary school. Noting the suspiciously warm area, the police rushed over to investigate.

Hardcastle had already gotten to work at that point, but her mother called and said she needed to come home right away. When she got there, she found two police officers standing at her door, and they told her that they suspected she had a heating system set up for cultivating marijuana. Hardcastle says she knew right away what was the source of the heat signature they’d noticed: She’d set up a heating system to keep her pet guinea pigs, Simon and Kenny, warm during a snap of particularly cold weather.

Hardcastle did have a big picture of Bob Marley with marijuana leaves on the wall of her house, and she was aware that was not a good look under the circumstances.

“I went home and there were two policemen who came in the house with me and I’ve got a big picture of Bob Marley with cannabis growing behind him so I thought: ‘Oh my God, don’t turn round,'” she told the BBC.

The police officers met Simon and Kenny and saw that the heat signature the helicopter had detected was not actually related to the production of cannabis, and the department apologized to Hardcastle for the inconvenience and embarrassment. Hardcastle does not seem angry about the mistake, but she does have an excellent story that she’ll be able to tell for the rest of her life about the time the police raided her house over a pair of guinea pigs.