Georgia Police Mistake SpaghettiOs for Meth // Woman Spends Month in Jail Waiting for Test Results

This is one of those stories that you just cannot make up. A Georgia woman was arrested after police found a dirty spoon in her person. Police believed it was meth residue. She asserted that it was dried sauce from an old can of SpaghettiOs. Several weeks of jail later and local officials confirmed that it was indeed dried SpaghettiOs sauce on her spoon:

Ashley Gabrielle Huff, 23, maintains the spoon had only spaghetti sauce. Gainesville police officers thought differently after conducting a field test of the spoon July 2. The charge of possessing methamphetamine was dismissed, according to the Hall County district attorney’s office, after a crime lab analysis. 

“I’m just happy to be free again,” said Huff, who was released on Sept. 18 from the Hall County Jail.
Gainesville police provided The Times with the arrest report this week, the result of a traffic stop for a tag light violation.

The officer’s report states he received consent to search Huff’s 1994 Ford Explorer, and searched a bag with the name “Ashley” printed on it. The officer described Huff, a passenger, as “nervous,” noting sores on her face, arms and legs. Inside the bag was a spoon with a “clear, crystal-like substance,” according to the report...

The officer reported he found a glass smoking device in the bag as well before conducting a field test for methamphetamine. “I tested the spoon with a field test kit, and the crystal-like substance on the spoon showed a positive indication for methamphetamine,” the report reads.

Huff was arrested and taken to Hall County Jail...

Huff told The Times the spoon and the SpaghettiOs were from a friend, as she and the other three people in the car were driving to a friend’s house in Gainesville. “We had been riding around, and I threw the can in the trash because I was eating them straight out of the can,” she said. “I just threw the spoon in my purse because I had borrowed it from a friend — the can of the SpaghettiOs and the spoon.”

The district attorney’s office issued a dismissal for Huff’s charge after further analysis on the spoon. “The Crime Lab report showed no controlled substances on the spoon submitted for testing, “ according to the dismissal signed by Northeastern Judicial Circuit District Attorney Lee Darragh.

Another report indicates that Huff was pressured to take a plea deal in order to get out of jail early.

Because of this arrest and incarceration, Huff missed her kids' birthday, as well as a job at a waffle house restaurant.