| Shelby County SD. |
An Ohio gun owner’s newly-purchased 1,000-pound gun safe was about 280 pounds heavier than it should have been upon deliver after police say Mexican smugglers loaded the iron box down with ten 28-pound bundles of weed before shipping it.
The Ohio man was not suspected in the smuggling (which is a good thing considering he’s the one who called the police).
The safe, made by the Champion Safe Co. of Provo, Utah was actually manufactured in Nogales, Mexico before being shipped – along with numerous other safes – from the company warehouse in Mexico to Mansfield, Ohio sometime in early June. A contracted truck driver then delivered it on June 19 to the customer.
The Associated Press story that broke the news doesn’t go into detail as to how the gun owner found the marijuana, which was stored in the walls of the gun safe. We’d like to think that he opened it up expecting that new-safe smell and instead was overwhelmed with the smell of $420,000 worth of brick Mexican schwag.
The truck driver that delivered the safe to the gun owner was cleared of any wrongdoing. Police say the 30 other safes delivered around the same time as the weed safe all came up empty after subsequent searches. Police now think the safe was loaded down between being shipped from the factory and making it’s way across the boarder. The safe clearly didn’t make it to it’s intended final destination, they say.
But the other suspect in the case, the driver who brought the safes up from Mexico, is now missing. Police didn’t go so far as to say the missing driver was related to the marijuana, but it’s not hard to imagine some pissed off cartel boss taking out his lost load of marijuana on the peon delivery driver.
Officials with the DEA said that normally such a small haul of marijuana isn’t worth their time, but the sophistication of the safe smuggling was enough for them to pay attention.
“It’s a pretty decent way of smuggling,” the official said to the Associate Press. “My guess is that it’s not the first time it’s happened.”