Utah family shocked to find drugs inside Christmas gift

FRUIT HEIGHTS – Police are investigating after a family in Fruit Heights found some opioid pills stuffed inside a Christmas gift they bought online.

It was a bizarre Christmas morning for the Hansen family as 21-year-old Ashley tried on one of her new gifts.

"I knew that the shoes were coming because I helped pick them out," she said.

But what Ashley Hansen found in her new Doc Martens went beyond the typical packaging.

"I put my foot in, but there was still, like, the wrapping paper inside it," she said.

So, she cleared it out.

"My foot still hit something, so I quickly take it off and dump it out. And then this little baggie of pills popped out, and so I was like, 'Well that's probably illegal,'" Ashley said.

It was definitely a Christmas first, at least in the Hansen house.

"So I take it upstairs and say, 'the shoes fit, but I found some drugs in them.' And so everyone's like 'What?'"

It surprised her parents, who bought the shoes online from a well-known retailer.

"In the shoes was this baggie of three pills which were oxycodone," said Ashley's father, Roger Hansen. "I'm an oncologist. I take care of cancer patients and yeah, so I could just look the pill up and see what it was, see how potent it was."

Even at only three pills, this was something that shouldn't be under anyone's tree.

Roger said the 40-milligram pills are dangerous.

"Which you know, if somebody just took all those three pills at once and had never taken this kind of drug before, that would be a lethal dose to them," he said.

The family is left with a lot of questions and concerns.

"I don't know what to think of it. It makes me realize how big of a drug problem there is in our country," Hansen said.

Detectives from the Davis County Sheriff's Office are currently working on the case. They said it may have happened in the warehouse, or someone who returned the shoes may have left the pills.

The investigation is in the very early stages.

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