I decided to do my free blog on a marijuana seizure in my home town. The other reason I choose this issue was because the marijuana seizure was the largest in the entire state of Virginia for 2010. On August 11th, Richmond County Sheriff’s Office received a tip of a marijuana grow operation in the Newland area of Richmond County, VA. On August 12th, investigators conducted surveillance around the subject area and claimed to have seen two men tending the plants. The suspects tried to flee when we law enforcement tried to confront, but only one got away. Jamie Ramirez-Duarte was captured and taken into custody. The offender claimed t that he was being forced to take care of the plants by a Mexican drug cartel. He claimed that if he didn’t so as they wanted, the drug cartel would kill his family. The article stated that the police are investigation whether the operation is connected to gangs, but until then, Jamie Ramirez-Duarte is being held in jail without bond. They also believe he may be an immigrant that entered the US illegally. Police are still looking for the other suspect that got away. DEA officials also showed up in Richmond County and found that the area looked like operations that have been done in California. The marijuana plots had lots of work done to them, including an irrigation system.
The investigators say that a total of 14,000 marijuana plants were seized. They claimed that the street value of the marijuana to be worth $45 million dollars. Before this event, the largest seizure of marijuana in Virginia was about 1,000 plants.
As bad as it sounds, at least my hometown has gotten noticed once again since the outcome of Chris Brown.
I have heard about this in Richmond. I am from Halifax and there is supposedly a branch of the cartel in our backwoods. We probably get all our stuff from Richmond. Pretty wild stuff.
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