$11 Million Marijuana Raid

UMATILLA NATIONAL FOREST - A wilderness raid in the upper Tucannon watershed Tuesday morning earned Columbia County Sheriff's deputies the larg­est marijuana seizure since 2008. Deputies pulled 4,562 pot plants from a steep slope inside the Umatilla National Forest about fivemiles from a site where 11,000 mari­juana plants were seized in 2008. No arrests were made in either case. "We're speculating that it may be the same group that set up this new grow site," said Jeff Jenkins, narcotics deputy for Columbia County.

Tuesday's haul had an es­timated street value of about $11 million, Jenkins said. The raid two years ago, also in steep national forest ter­rain, would have been worth close to $28 million. Jenkins was one of three local deputies, including an­other from Columbia County and one from Walla Walla County, dropped in by he­licopter

to the grow site. Officers were harnessed and hooked to a long lead at the crest of a ridge then lowered close to a thousand feet down into a ravine to collect evi­dence and remove the mari­juana plants.

"It was quite a rush," said Jenkins, who participated in the "short haul" for the first time Tuesday. He and the other two local deputies train annually for such an opera­tion but rarely have to make use of the training. "The other agencies used to go in and do all these for us local agencies, but we found that we needed to collect more evidence than they could provide and they would pull out before we had everything we needed," Jenkins said. "So now a few of us get trained to go along."

Before the helicopter ar­rived Tuesday, a special team of state agents made a quiet raid on the camp down inside the ravine, but the site had been abandoned. "We found one tent but multiple sleeping bags," Jenkins said. "Signs inside the grow lead us to believe the growers were of Hispanic origin."

Narcotics officers often refer to these large, local growing sites as "Mexican National Grows," he said. Despite the lack of arrests, Jenkins was hopeful. "It went well," he said. "We did get some investiga­tive leads out of it. We'll have to do some leg work now." Captain Timothy Braniff, with Washington State Pa­trol,

was on hand Tuesday as his men assisted in the raid. He indicated that while the lack of arrests was frustrat­ing,

it also meant operations were safer for officers in­volved. Columbia County was assisted Tuesday by Walla Walla County, Walla Walla Police Department, GarfieldCounty (the site was right on the county line), Washington State Patrol, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, and the National Guard.