Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – For the third week in a row, local drug detectives seized a very large amount of methamphetamine from a vehicle when they conducted a traffic stop yesterday on Interstate 5 near Napavine.

Fifty pounds of the drug was pulled from a green Chevrolet truck with Oregon license plates, according to Centralia Police Department Cmdr. Pat Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald described it as a continuing investigation and said the Joint Narcotics Enforcement Team was working with law enforcement from Oregon as well as members of Homeland Security Investigations.

The driver, 25-year-old Antonio D. Beltran-Villanueva from Portland Oregon, was arrested for drug trafficking and booked into the Lewis County Jail yesterday morning.

Fitzgerald said K-9 Axel and partner assisted and one pound of meth was discovered under the driver’s seat and then an additional 44 bundles were located in the box of the truck. Beltran-Villanueva did not have a valid driver’s license, according to Fitzgerald.

JNET is made up of officers from the Centralia Police Department, the Chehalis Police Department, the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington state Department of Corrections.

Three men were arrested last Thursday when two vehicles met up with officers in the parking lot of Home Depot in Chehalis and the trunk of a car with California plates was found to contain just over 23 pounds of meth and a little more than two pounds of heroin.

The Thursday before that, the team confiscated 126 pounds of meth from the sleeping berth of a big rig hauling Starbuck’s products between California and Spokane after a traffic stop. Two men were arrested. They also located just under two and a half pounds of heroin, several thousand Oxycodone pills and a few grams of cocaine.

The various arrestees have been from California, Mexico, Vancouver, Washington and one had a temporary identification card out of Stone Park, Illinois.

Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2018 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Top story of the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.