Police accuse bank robbery suspect of gobbling up note (with dashcam video) 
 
 Police accuse bank robbery suspect of gobbling up note (with dashcam video) 
 
 By Gina Mace 
 
 Special to the Beacon Journal 
 
 Police believe they have their man. 
 
 But they fear their suspect in a bank robbery may have eaten some of the evidence — the note handed to a Streetsboro bank teller demanding cash — while he was handcuffed and leaning over the hood of a police cruiser. 
 
 Twinsburg police Patrolman Daniel Biada said a dash cam video of Thursday's arrest of John H. Ford, 35, of Cleveland, shows Ford gobbling a piece of paper while officers searched his pockets. 
 
 ''As we're searching him, officers are removing items and throwing them on the cruiser [hood],'' Biada said. ''We're searching him for weapons. We're not looking at his head.'' 
 
 The whereabouts of the note demanding money came into question after Biada was taken into custody and Streetsboro investigators asked whether officers had found the piece of paper. 
 
 Twinsburg police reviewed the images captured on camera and said they observed Ford leaning over to eat something off the hood of the cruiser. 
 
 ''He grabbed it in his mouth, just like Pacman,'' Biada said. ''He just ate it right there.'' 
 
 Authorities said they found a .38-caliber pistol on the driver's side floor of Ford's car and a wad of cash covered in red ink on the passenger side of the vehicle. 
 
 Ford is also a suspect in bank robberies in Stow and Akron. 
 
 In the Streetsboro case, a man walked into the FirstMerit branch on state Route 14 around 10 a.m. and handed a teller a note that demanded money. The robber did not produce a gun inside of the bank. 
 
 Witnesses say he fled in a dark Ford Escort. 
 
 Twinsburg police stopped Ford, who was driving a black Ford Escort, on Interstate 480 shortly after the robbery was reported and turned him over to Streetsboro police. ||||| COLERAIN TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- Used cars sometimes come with unpleasant surprises -- things like mysterious smells, squeaky brakes and dents that went unnoticed until you left the lot. 
 
 For one Northern Kentucky man, who asked for his own safety that he not be identified, the surprise he purchased with his 2014 Volkswagen Jetta made all of those other inconveniences seem small: He found $130,000 worth of cartel heroin inside a secret compartment. 
 
 The man said he found over two pounds of heroin in this hidden compartment under the driver's seat. 
 
 Not right away, though. He had been driving the car for over two weeks before a rattling noise made him pop the passenger seat and discover an empty, hidden compartment. 
 
 "We went out to dinner one night and the car started making a strange noise inside the passenger seat," he said. 
 
 The man then checked the driver's seat, and that compartment contained over two pounds of heroin. 
 
 He said he immediately called the police and turned over the drugs when he realized what he had found. 
 
 The driver found this heroin in a 2014 Volkswagen Jetta he purchased. 
 
 The Ohio State Highway Patrol found three kilos of heroin in the same car nearly eight months earlier. At the time, according to police, it was driven by Rolf Kruger, a 63-year-old former Mexican Highway Patrol officer whom a cartel threatened into hauling heroin across the country. 
 
 Kruger was arrested, but the car made its way back to an impound lot, to the Columbus Fair Auto Auction and then to McCluskey Automotive in Colerain Township. 
 
 Lieutenant Robert Sellers of the Ohio State Highway Patrol said a K-9 and many other police officers searched the car before it was released, but they did not find additional heroin at that time. 
 
 That’s not necessarily surprising. 
 
 Tim Reagan, who leads the Cincinnati Division of the DEA, said compartments built by drug cartels have become increasingly complex, making it more difficult for law enforcement to locate them. 
 
 “It’s actually probably more common that law enforcement does miss cash or drugs in vehicles just based on the way things are hidden," he said. "The only person that may know exactly how to operate the trap or where the trap is is the person who built it." 
 
 Sellers said the highway patrol had seized nearly 160 pounds of heroin since the start of 2016. 
 
 As for the car, McCluskey Automotive took it back, and a sales manager said they never would have sold it at all if they knew its history.
– It was almost a good idea. Above the Law takes note of a video making the rounds of a bank robbery suspect in Ohio. When an officer finds the alleged note to the teller and dumps it on the hood of the cruiser, the man eats it without the cops noticing. Too bad for him, a dashboard cam captured it all. ''He grabbed it in his mouth, just like Pacman,'' an officer tells the Akron Beacon Journal. ''He just ate it right there.'' Lucky for police, they also found a pistol and ink-stained cash in the suspect's car.