RUMFORD – A truck driven by a drug agent when marijuana was stolen from the back of it this week should have had better security, officials said Thursday.

“The question is, Why didn’t he have another vehicle in back of (the truck) for security? The last thing I want to see is an agent getting carjacked,” Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Division I Commander Ken Pike said in a telephone interview.

Pike and a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety stood behind the undercover agent’s decision to chase after the pair of young men who snatched a branch of immature marijuana from one of 10 4-foot-tall plants confiscated earlier that day in Franklin County.

Pike said the incident happened at about 4:15 p.m. Wednesday when the agent was driving 10 uncovered marijuana plants bound at the roots with duct tape to the MDEA temporary evidence room in the Rumford police station when he stopped at a traffic light on Hancock Street.

“One of these clowns jumped out of a vehicle (behind the agent) and took a branch off a 4-foot plant. It had about a dozen immature buds and leaves on it. Then he jumped back into the car, and the agent got out with his badge and tried to identify himself, but they sped off,” Pike said.

The two men in the silver Hyundai were Travis Child of Peru and Jeremy Belskis of Rumford, both 20. Contacted late Wednesday night, Child admitted that he grabbed one of the plants and ran back to Belskis’ car, then took off with the agent pursuing, except he said they didn’t know the pot-hauling driver was an MDEA agent.

“We didn’t even know he was a cop or we would have stopped. We thought he was a drug dealer,” Child said. “It never crossed our mind that it was a DEA agent. We were just following him through town.”

Both Pike and public safety spokesman Stephen McCausland said that a drug dealer would not be driving around town with exposed marijuana plants in the back of a pickup truck.

“If it had been an actual drug dealer, this would be an entirely different story. Fortunately, it was a DEA agent, and this was resolved very quickly,” McCausland said.

Pike said the agent called a local MDEA agent for help, who, in turn, requested assistance from Rumford police.

“When they stopped at a stop sign, (the agent) got out with his gun and badge and tried to stop them, and they fled,” Pike said.

Child said the agent tried to ram their car, but Pike disagreed.

“We don’t ram vehicles, and we don’t chase vehicles. He was following them, but he had no lights or sirens on his vehicle,” he said.

McCausland, however, identified the chase as “pursuit with an unmarked pickup to obviously retrieve what had been taken.”

The chase through Rumford streets lasted for as long as 10 minutes, before Child and Belskis drove off Route 2, also called Hancock Street, and into Child’s father’s business lot at Child and Sons Auto Sales, McCausland said.

Child said he jumped out of the car there to fight someone he thought was a drug dealer, but McCausland said at that time, the agent “identified himself as a police officer, and the two were taken into custody at gunpoint.”

During the chase, McCausland said the young men threw some, but not all, of the stolen marijuana out of their car, which is why Rumford police searched the vehicle.

“There were some procedural issues that need to be addressed. “I believe this is a supervisor issue, but you just can’t go out and steal what you want out of someone’s vehicle,” Pike said.

He said the agent should have been wearing a tan or brown MDEA marijuana eradication shirt that is marked MDEA on the front and POLICE on the back, and the pot should have been under a tarp. The agent, however, was wearing a brown shirt with a white badge emblem on the front but there was no word “POLICE” on the back. Marijuana plants were also sticking up out of the truck bed.

“We will review procedures and see whether or not the agent followed them and change or tighten up on them. But, from these two young men’s view, this was a really stupid thing to do,” McCausland said by phone Thursday afternoon in Augusta.