While looking to arrest the landowners associated with a massive marijuana growing operation busted in October near Mad River, police uncovered an entire McKinleyville apartment complex dedicated to growing pot.
The Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office served a search warrant Oct. 26 in a remote area of eastern Humboldt County that resulted in more than 40 arrests, the seizure of almost 2,000 growing plants, more than 1,450 pounds of dried marijuana and 240 pounds of processed marijuana buds.
Most of those arrested at the scene were trimmers hired to process the dried marijuana into a salable product, Thadeus Greenson reports in the Eureka Times-Standard. Now, it appears, the district attorney investigators are in the process of rounding up the people who own the land on which the large cultivation operation was located.
According to Humboldt County Assessor’s Office records, the five parcels making up the property have a combined value of more than $1 million and are owned by Meghan Moody, Vanessa Flieg, Courtney Fleming, Tyler Meenan and Jack Jones. Moody was arrested at the scene on Oct. 26 but quickly posted $75,000 bail and has yet to be charged in the case.
According to a press release, investigators served search warrants last week in an effort to locate and arrest Fleming and Meenan, eventually taking them into custody on suspicion of cultivation and possession of marijuana for sale. Investigators reported seizing evidence of marijuana cultivation and illegal drug trafficking from both Fleming’s Fieldbrook residence and Meenan’s Arcata home.
Looking for two additional suspects from the Mad River grow operation, investigators went to a residence in the 1900 block of Ocean Avenue in McKinleyville. Though investigators had no luck locating the suspects — whom the DA’s Office declined to identify — investigators reported detecting the “overwhelming odor of growing marijuana emitting from the entire area of the apartment complex,” which comprised 13 separate units, according to the release. One unit’s resident reportedly agreed to a search, and investigators reported finding a functional indoor marijuana grow operation but no growing plants.
Officers then received a search warrant for 11 of the 12 remaining apartments, another Ocean Avenue property and several vehicles, according to the release. Each location contained evidence of a functional indoor marijuana growing operation, according to the release, leading to the arrests of Barbara Benson, Kimberly Mundy, Dustin Garnier, Nicole Rahman, Patrick Majewski, Vanessa Blount and Robert Cox.
Flieg remains at large, and the DA’s Office is asking anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts — or those of Paul Givens — to notify their nearest law enforcement agency. The District Attorney’s Office was unable to say Monday whether it is seeking Jones.
Officials have said the scope of the Mad River operation — located about 10 miles off of State Route 36 — was massive, with dozens of greenhouses spread across the property irrigated by water illegally drawn from the Mad River. It took DA investigators more than two days to process the crime scene and collect evidence from the site.
”It was a huge commercial operation,” DA Chief Investigator Mike Hislop said in a previous interview with the Times-Standard.
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