By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
The medical marijuana plants stolen from a Toledo home earlier this week turned up, but who took them and why is still a mystery that remains to be solved.
Deputies were called about 8:50 p.m. on Wednesday night to the 500 block of Jackson Highway South when Gabe Kelly and his brother-in-law reported they had interrupted a burglary.
Kelly said he saw three or four people inside his house, who fled when they arrived, carrying his plants. The two men gave chase.
“They’re at a dead run, we’re kind of at a half jog, cause we really didn’t want to catch them,” Kelly said yesterday.
The pair stopped when they heard a gunshot, hid behind a woodpile and waited for deputies.
Kelly said the intruders had headed for his landlord’s shop building on neighboring property.
The chimney from the shop was “billowing with marijuana smoke,” Kelly said. And a trail of plant parts lay strewn between the two buildings, he said.
For whatever reason, the sheriff’s office didn’t get a search warrant, although they did bring in a K-9.
The following morning, when a second set of deputies returned to the scene, Kelly’s partially burned plants were found in the wood stove inside the shop.
And the bullet hole found in the shop’s roll-up door – large enough for Kelly to stick his finger through – leaves Kelly very much wanting to get to the bottom of the odd theft.
“Somebody tried to take my life,” Kelly said.
Lewis County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Steve Aust said finding the bullet hole changed the investigation.
And why someone would steal a dozen marijuana plants and try to incinerate them next door, he couldn’t say.
“I don’t know,” Aust said yesterday. “I guess when we find those people, we’ll have to ask them.”
The landlord said someone broke into his shop, Aust said. “He’s saying he didn’t burn ’em, he doesn’t know how they got there.”
Kelly, 31, is married with two children, and another on the way. He and his family have rented the house – a former gas station – for the past two or so years, he said, from his mother’s husband.
The couple is in the process of moving out, as relations there soured when Kelly’s’ mother and her husband separated, he said.
Kelly is the designated medical marijuana provider for his mother.
He said he had 12 to 15 plants growing in a padlocked attic room. They ranged from two feet to four feet in height, and were “budding,” he said.
He’s frustrated because the loss means his mom will have to endure unnecessary pain and suffering, he said.
It’s not legal for him to go buy marijuana for her.
“The major loss here is obviously not a financial one,” he said. “But the loss of my mother’s and my, quality, organic, homegrown strains.”
He also is a medical marijuana user, saying it keeps him from having to take pills for pain for an old foot injury.
His mother uses it for pain and to improve her appetite, he said, as she suffers from something called wasting disease.
Kelly said he spent $450 to buy just 10 special seeds to grow his crop.
He said he was growing it with landlord’s blessing and kept it discreet, something his best friend didn’t even know about, he said.
When he returned this afternoon to check on the house, he found a cardboard box with the remains of the plants in his driveway. The sheriff’s office didn’t seize them because he has a valid authorization for medical marijuana.
It’s not really salvageable, he said.
“They destroyed the mature plants, I was able to retrieve some of the young plants from the driveway,” he said.
Cmdr. Aust said he didn’t have all the details yesterday, but deputies didn’t believe they had have enough evidence that night to get a search warrant.
However, the sheriff’s office has some leads they are following up on, he said.
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Side notes:
• Kelly said he guessed his plants would have yielded an average of two ounces each.
• There are roughly 28 grams in an ounce.
• Kelly estimated his species would be valued at $15 to $20 per gram.
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