DOZENS GO BEFORE JUDGE

GRAHAM -- It didn't take long for the smooth-faced, 21-year-old undercover
police officer to find a student selling marijuana inside Graham High School.

"In his first class, the guy leans over across the aisle and says 'Hey, you
smoke dope? If you do, I can hook you up,' " Graham police Chief Milford
Miller said.

Miller recounted the story Thursday as dozens of high school students and
others arrested this week on charges of selling drugs to undercover
officers in Alamance County high schools had their first appearance in
court. Some of them wore orange jumpsuits because they'd spent the night in
jail.

Bobby, the undercover officer who asked that his last name not be used,
said in an interview Thursday that he became a popular student during his
time at the school.

Miller recruited Bobby to pose as a high school student after Bobby applied
for a job with the police department.

"We swore him in in the back seat of the car, away from the police
department," Miller said. Besides Miller, only the Graham High School
resource officer and a couple of drug investigators at the department, who
debriefed Bobby daily, knew his identity, or even knew that the Graham
Police Department had an undercover officer working in the school.

The department provided Bobby a vehicle complete with a parking pass from
Green Hope High School in Morrisville, and gave him a Green Hope yearbook
so he could pass as a student who had transferred from there. They also
gave him some rules about how to conduct himself -- no dating, for instance.

"Some people really took a liking to me like," Bobby said. "I was one of
them. I just hung out and played practical jokes and had a good time."

Bobby liked his auto body class, and physical education helped keep him in
shape. In some other classes, he didn't do as well, though Bobby didn't say
what grades he got.

"When I got his report card at the end of the semester, I grounded him,"
Miller joked.

Some students gave him nicknames, calling him "Bling Bling" or "Dude,"
Bobby said. Meanwhile, he couldn't tell his family, not even his fiancee,
what he was doing. He told them he was training and doing paperwork, then
working a 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. patrol shift, then on the warrant squad.

After five months, he said, "the lies and the stories were starting to run
out."

One of the students charged with selling drugs to Bobby is [NAME DELETED]
17. His grandmother, [NAME DELETED] said Thursday she thought [NAME
DELETED] was using drugs. She said she didn't approve of students dealing
or using drugs, but she thought the law enforcement officers should be
focused on finding the adult dealers supplying students, not arresting
dozens of students.

[NAME DELETED], she said, took the undercover officer to someone's house
and picked up the drugs for the officer.

"Why didn't they go out with the people (the students) were getting the
drugs from?" [NAME DELETED] said. "Why didn't they go after the adults?"

[NAME DELETED] and other family members of those arrested crowded into a
district courtroom Thursday and watched as the judge warned the students
what kind of sentences they might face if convicted. He then asked each of
them whether they needed a lawyer appointed or would hire one themselves.

"It will depend on your record, it will depend on the facts and the
discretion of the judge," said District Court Judge Brad Allen, as he went
down a list of offenses and the maximum punishments, mostly 15 months or 30
months of jail time per count, that students could face.

But those maximum punishments only apply to defendants with prior records;
first offenders might face no jail time.

The most well-known of the defendants, [NAME DELETED], a star basketball
player at Eastern Alamance High School recruited by UNC, has hired an
attorney, Burlington lawyer Dawn D. Allen, to represent him. Allen is
married to Judge Brad Allen, who left the courtroom and had another
district court judge handle [NAME DELETED] case.