Haskell County Sheriff's Office Makes Illegal Marijuana Bust

The Haskell County Sheriff’s Office says it confiscated and destroyed thousands of marijuana plants from an illegal growing operation near Stigler, run by Chinese citizens.

Haskell County Sheriff Terry Garland says deputies went to a house fire call and discovered grow houses filled with marijuana plants.

Garland called the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, who said it was an illegal operation, and that led to a search warrant.

“They estimated that there was about 81 hundred mature plants and maybe a couple of thousand small plants that wasn’t ready for anything,” Garland said.

He says agents and deputies destroyed all the plants by setting them on fire and then burying them. What’s still left at the grow house is a mountain of trash.

From cigarette boxes to cases of bottled water to piles of plastic, Garland says all of the garbage is a big headache.

“The neighbors are concerned about what’s going to happen to this if it rains a bunch and it washes down onto their property,” he said. “Is it going to contaminate it with this stuff.”

Garland says this problem isn’t unique to just this grow site.

“Seems like all the grow houses have this going on of some sort, maybe not this bad, but this is a mess,” said Garland.

Deputies say nobody was home during the house fire, and the cause of that is still under investigation. They say the property was empty, and nobody showed up while they were serving the search warrant.

While the illegal plants are now taken care of, Garland says the big concern for everyone living around the property is what will happen next with all this trash.

“They want to know who’s going to clean the mess up, which that’s a good question, who’s responsible,” he said. “I think the landowner should be responsible.”

OBN agents say they’ve shut down more than 2,500 illegal grow sites in the past three years. Agents say they seized more than 850,000 pounds of illegal marijuana as part of those investigations.