Man Buys Safe, Finds 300 Pounds of Weed Inside

Safe was packaged by prisoners in a Mexican prison
By Ruth Brown,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 19, 2013 4:36 PM CDT
Man Buys Safe, Finds 300 Pounds of Weed Inside
   (Shelby County Sheriff's Office)

A man in Ohio ordered a 6-foot-tall gun safe last month, but when it arrived, he found there was no room for his rifles inside. Why? It was stuffed with almost 300 pounds of marijuana—carrying an estimated street value of $420,000 (yes, 420), authorities say. The safe was shipped from Mexico and packaged by prisoners there, leading authorities to believe they had probably stumbled onto a drug delivery gone wrong, ABC News reports. "Someplace between Mexico and the warehouse in Northern Ohio, the drugs got mixed up and put in the wrong safe and got delivered to the wrong person," says Shelby County Sheriff John Lenhart.

The driver who delivered the safe to the customer has been cleared, but the driver who delivered the safe from Mexico to Ohio has gone missing, Reuters reports. "Not only are we looking for him," Lenhart says per ABC, "but the bad guys are, too." The DEA has been working with local authorities on the case—not so much because 300 pounds is a lot of weed by the agency's standards, but because it could point to a much wider smuggling operation. (More drug smuggling stories.)

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