LEGALLY SEIZING THE MILLIONS COULD TAKE TIME

Authorities Have Begun The Court Process For Seizing The $3.7 Million
Recovered After The I-70 Traffic Stop Earlier This Month.

COLBY -- The Deep Rock Cafe bills itself as the place "Where the locals meet."

It's about a mile north of the spot along I-70 where police found $3.7
million during a traffic stop earlier this month.

Ask the men who sip coffee and eat breakfast as the orange sunrise

shines through the little diner's windows what they think should happen to
the money, and they say it would be nice if the officer who made the stop,
Cpl. Scott Sitton, would get a bonus.

Or maybe the town's 10 police officers soon will be driving BMWs and
Cadillacs, diners Larry Arehart and Tom Simpson joke. And the county's
struggling farmers could use some of it, former Colby Mayor Max Embree says.

Embree knows the law won't allow for such distribution, that the money has
to go for law enforcement purposes. The suspected drug money is more than
six times the Colby Police Department's annual budget.

Colby police and nearly a dozen law enforcement agencies in Kansas and
Colorado have begun the legal process for seizing the $3.7 million and
another $6 million found in a Colorado storage locker the same day

Sitton stopped the car Robert Henry Golding was riding in near Colby.

It smelled like drugs

Once Colby Police Chief Randall Jones knew Sitton was safe and Golding had
died from what police said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound during the
traffic stop, he started thinking about the evidence.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation and police cleared the scene of the
shooting around midnight. A wrecker towed the car to the Colby police
station, where it sat, the contents still a mystery, until police got a
search warrant.

At 1:32 a.m., four and a half hours after the traffic stop, investigators
first opened a padlocked duffel bag taken from the trunk of the car. They
were certain they would find brick-shaped bundles of marijuana, Jones said.
The first thing they took out of the bag was a cellophane-wrapped bundle of
$100 bills.

"That particular bundle we were looking at was $100,000," he said. "It had
10 reams of $100s, 100 in a ream. All of a sudden it's, 'My gosh.'"

After sunrise Jan. 15, Jones called a Kansas highway patrolman in Hays and
asked him to bring a drug dog to the Colby police station. Cardboard boxes
containing the money still were in the trunk of the car.

The Highway Patrol dog barked at the trunk. When investigators removed a
box from the trunk, the dog barked at the box. It smelled like drug money.

More than nine hours later, the police chief, sheriff, two bank employees
and a KBI agent had counted the money. In a back room of the town's public
safety building, they separated the bills into stacks and fed it into a
machine that counts 100 bills in a matter of seconds.

They counted it twice, recording their work on seven video tapes.

The money was dirty. Being in the same room with it made his throat hurt,
Jones said. The counting machine spit out so much dirt and dust that it
looked like the back of a combine, Thomas County Sheriff Tom Jones said.

It smelled musty, and some bills were blood stained. Some bills were
printed in the 1950s.

Months of bureaucracy

It could be months before Colby officials know whether they will get to
keep any of the $3.77 million, said Jared Maag, assistant Kansas attorney
general, lead attorney for the state on the case. The KBI and the Thomas
County Sheriff's Department also will get some of the money, if it is
forfeited, because they also worked on the investigation.

The state filed a claim on the money Jan. 18 in a Thomas County district
court, Maag said.

Federal authorities in Colorado filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to seize
$5,999,875 found in a locker Golding had rented and $47,710 from a
Pennsylvania bank account.

If someone files a claim to the money within 30 days, a lengthy court
battle begins, Maag said. If no one tries to claim it, the money most
likely will be forfeited.

If the money is forfeited, state and county attorney agencies can keep as
much as 20 percent, Maag said. The rest can be given to the police agencies
to divide among themselves, he said.

State law says law enforcement agencies can use seized money only on things
that their regular annual budgets do not cover.

Helping the community

Randall Jones said forfeited drug cash since 1996 has paid for a police
shooting range, a building for searching vehicles and storing equipment, a
dirt mover and a plasma cutter for removing hidden compartments from seized
vehicles.

"The money could be used for education programs, a school resource officer,
expanding the public safety building," Randall Jones said.

The Thomas County Jail, sheriff's department and Colby Police Department
share quarters in a one-story brick building adjacent to the county's
historic courthouse. The departments are sure to share whatever benefits
they reap from the seizure, Randall Jones said.

"I never anticipated this," he said. "This is something I hope can be
beneficial to the community."

At the Deep Rock Cafe, former Mayor Embree said he also sees the need for a
bigger public safety building.

In the end, Tom Simpson and the diners at the Deep Rock Cafe doubt they
will be effected much by the money.

"I don't think I'll get any of it," Simpson
said.