EL PASO COUNTY – El Paso County sheriff’s deputies hauled away about a hundred marijuana plants at a grow house near Ellicott highway.
But it wasn’t the quantity that deputies found impressive.
It was the quality of the plants.
Inside the grow house, it’s evident how neatly the plants were stored and organized.
The room was well-ventilated – even well-hydrated.
“This is one of the better ones that we’ve seen,” said Lt. Paul Mynatt with El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
It means investigators have to think about how many more of these exist.
“It’s something to take a look at, regards to whether or not it’s part of a bigger criminal organization,” Mynatt said.
“And that’s something that’s always in the back of our mind.”
But it’s the intel they gain from other investigations that help point them in the right direction.
“We follow the trail and go off of intelligence and prior investigations to lead us to the next grow,” Mynatt noted.
“We don’t just hop around from grow to grow. what we suspect, we devolve probable cause based on known facts.”
El Paso County Sheriff’s Office says these tips have also sent traffickers running the other direction, with grow house busts down about 20-percent from the same time last year.
“People are packing up and they’re going home. We get a lot of drug traffickers out here from Miami. They came out here to grow, once we started hitting them real (sic) hard,” Mynatt pointed out.
“We come out to some grow houses and they’re already gone because they caught wind of us coming.”
Keeping up with these grow houses is all in a days work for Mynatt and his team.
“This was a good day out here,” he said. “Feels good.”
One arrest has been made in connection to this grow house.
