ROCHESTER, N.Y. – This Consumer Investigation takes a deeper look at a toy the state says is dangerous. Just before Christmas, New York State’s Division of Consumer Protection said the MAXX Action helicopter toy sold at Dollar General tested positive for high lead levels.

On Monday, I reached out to the CEO of the company that manufactures the toy. And he says New York State’s Division of Consumer Protection is dead wrong, and he’s calling on state leaders to retract the warning they issued just before Christmas.

On December 23, the Division called on the Consumer Product Safety Commission to recall the MAXX Action helicopter and for Dollar General to pull the toy from store shelves. New York’s Consumer Protection Division said the State’s testing found lead levels at almost twice the level allowed in paint. The Division says the problem was the black coating on the toy’s windows.

So, I visited three Rochester-area Dollar General stores in search of the Maxx Action Helicopter toy. I found it at the Dollar General on Monroe Avenue. At the cash register, the clerk said the toy was supposed to have been pulled from shelves. She wouldn’t accept payment and gave me the toy instead.

I’ve emailed Dollar General repeatedly for verification that it is no longer selling the toy, and I’ve gotten no response. But to my surprise, I found the toy at other retailers including Speedway and Hobby Lobby. I found a wealth of MAXX Action toys at Target. A toy chopper that looks just like the one in question is selling as part of a set.

On Dollar General’s website, as of Tuesday afternoon, it listed the MAXX Action helicopter is “unbranded,” which means the toy isn’t licensed by a specific company.

After I questioned Sunny Days leaders about the listing, it was removed from Dollar General’s website. But the remaining MAXX Action toys on the website are also listed as unbranded.

Because there is no mention of the brand or manufacturer on Dollar General’s website, I checked the UPC. It’s the series of numbers beneath the bar code. It indicates the manufacturer is Sunny Days Entertainment based in South Carolina.

So, of course, I had some questions for the company. Melvin Wells, the CEO, quickly responded writing, “We have researched this issue and will be approaching the State of New York to retract their statement and provide more accurate test results as we did emergency retests on these toys at outside labs and they passed safety standards.”

Sunny Days attorney Chanelle Acheson reached out providing even more information saying, “Only one specimen out of 11 samples from five separate toys that the state tested revealed a positive result for lead and the rest of the specimens from all samples came back as non-detectable for lead. As I am sure you are also aware, the detection level for lead is extremely low (10 parts per million) and a typical positive result is in the thousands, not the low detection level reported on the one specimen by the State.

The State was unable to replicate a positive result for any of the items, and further testing of the items in question by SDE by five separate certified labs found non-detectable lead for the same item and the same production code as the one that appears to have erroneously tested positive in the test run by the State. This toy has been in production since 2018 and has been regularly tested by certified testing labs and has never tested positive for lead including all the other specimens from the same product run by the State at the same time).

SDE will be working with the State to attempt to determine testing processes, protocols, and sampling and what may have yielded a positive report. SDE was not contacted by the State before or after its press release, SDE takes the safety of its toys extremely seriously and adheres to the most rigorous safety and testing protocols. All follow-up testing done by SDE- by external, independent, certified labs- since being made aware of NY State’s press release has failed to replicate the positive result, and all shown no detectable levels of lead. As such, the only working hypothesis is that there was either a lab error or contamination of the specimen run by the State that returned a positive result.

So that begs the question: Was the state’s one positive test result a false positive? I’ve emailed New York State’s Division of Consumer Protection multiple times. As of the writing of this story on Tuesday evening, I had gotten no response.

And I still have so many questions. Why did New York’s Division of Consumer Protection only call on Dollar General to pull the toy when I found the MAXX Action helicopter being sold at half a dozen retailers? And why would Sunny Days, the manufacturer and usually the distributor of the toy, allow Dollar General to list its toy as unbranded, as though no company had licensed the brand?

I’ll keep digging.