A Queens man busted during a traffic stop had cops check on the 8-year-old son he left home alone – and they discovered the boy sleeping in an apartment stacked with drugs, cash and guns.
It started when police pulled over 30-year-old Nuquan Stewart’s car for a failed brake light last Tuesday night, smelled pot and found six plastic bags of the drug sticking out of his hooded sweatshirt, and a gravity knife in cupholder.
As police cuffed him, Stewart pleaded with them to check on the boy he left a half-mile away in his 222nd street apartment. He even gave them his apartment keys.
But when they arrived, pot wafted from the first-floor apartment.
“You could even smell it through the door,” officer Anton Bartoldus of the 105th Precinct’s anti-crime unit recalled. The smell was absolutely horrible.”
Upon entry, they discovered a lucrative marijuana operation, with numerous bags of marijuana in plain view in the kitchen and living room, and stacks of money.
A search warrant turned up 30 pounds of marijuana, $17,500 in cash, a loaded semiautomatic Smith & Wesson and automatic Ruger AR-15 assault rifle along with two magazines loaded with 20 live rounds.
The boy, who was asleep in the bedroom, was taken by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and later transferred to another relative.
Stewart was charged with criminal possession of marijuana, a machine gun and loaded firearm. He previously has been arrested for marijuana and crack cocaine offenses, burglary, criminal mischief and resisting arrest.
He’s being held on $25,000 bail at Rikers Island and due back in court Oct. 29.