A nervous driver led to the discovery of pipe bombs and drugs during a traffic stop Monday afternoon at a rural gas station in Rowan County.

The Rowan County Sheriff’s Office says a deputy pulled over a car for an expired tag at the Exxon 7-Eleven on Long Ferry Road. The deputy noticed that the driver “appeared to be very nervous.”

“This deputy was proactive,” Sheriff Travis Allen said. “And being proactive, just done a minor traffic offense led to something that could have been dangerous to the public

A K-9 unit responded to the traffic stop and it “alerted to the presence of illegal narcotics,” according to the sheriff’s office. Deputies got the driver out of the vehicle and did a full search, and that’s when they found “what appeared to be several pipe bombs inside the vehicle’s glove box.”

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Deputies evacuated the gas station and moved people away from the vehicle, and a bomb squad from Cabarrus County showed up to detonate the pipe bombs, according to the sheriff’s office.

“While the bombs are an issue, you also think you’re sitting at a gas station on thousands of gallons of fuel,” Allen said. “So no matter how small the bomb may be, or how large the bombs may be, if something happens at that store, you have the potential to have something very catastrophic there.”

Afterward, the bomb squad searched the rest of the vehicle and found “some methamphetamine, a glass smoking pipe, and some ball bearings.”

The driver was identified as Christopher Wade McDaniel. Deputies got search warrants for his home and his parents’ home after getting information that he was making pipe bombs at his parents’ house. The sheriff’s office said no more explosives or explosive materials were found.

There was no evidence that indicated McDaniel had the bombs for a deviant purpose.

“When you’re dealing in a rural community, pipe, a bomb doesn’t always mean, ‘I’m going to … I want to blow something up or hurt somebody,’” Allen said. “Some of these are recreationally made to blow up, stumps on farms to set off and you know, just for fun. Not for deviant purposes other than constructing the bomb.”

McDaniel was arrested and charged with possession of weapons of mass destruction, possession of methamphetamine, possession of drug paraphernalia, and traffic violations. He was taken to jail and held on a $250,000 bond.

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