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If you’re a longtime toker, you’ve probably been there: bag of weed is empty, resin in the pipes is charred out and you’ve got to find something to puff on. Maybe you didn’t always maintain your personal integrity while scouring the city streets looking to score a bag of grass, we get it.
But while some of us are guilty of our fair share of shady and sometimes morally-skewed indiscretions as a result of the search for more ganja, it’s still weed and pot users aren’t normally doing crackhead-like things to get their fix like shaking down an elderly funeral home director. Or, at least that’s what we thought.
Earlier last week, two masked men armed with pistols and a blazing joint broke into the apartment above a Raleigh, North Carolina funeral home, and nearly sent 66-year-old owner, Bruce Lightner into a full-blown heart attack while attempting to steal marijuana.
“I was in my bed and my bedroom door was closed – and these two guys bust in my bedroom door. Both of them had pistols, and … the one in the front put the gun to my head,” said Lightner, adding that one of the men was smoking marijuana right before leaving him on the bed, hogtied with duct tape.
However, the two thieving culprits were apparently not looking to lay claims to the old man’s hash stash; instead, the word on the street was that his son, 24-year-old Nicholas Lightner, was holding a fat sack of Carolina cannabis somewhere in his bedroom. “They didn’t know my son’s name. They just kept asking me where’s my boy?” said Lightner.
Although Nicholas Lightner was not at home at the time to show the bud-toking thugs exactly where he kept his supply, they took it upon themselves to try to find it by ripping his bedroom to shreds. Meanwhile, all the excitement was getting to old man Lightner, who was in his bedroom suffering from a fierce attack of angina pectoris. Luckily, he was able to convince one of the high hoodlums to feed him a dose of his heart medicine. “He got the bottle and put a pill in my mouth, and got me some water, and that was weird – holding a gun to my head and giving me a pill,” said Lightner.
The would be weed thieves managed to get away with the old man’s cell phone, $85 in cash, and some munchies from the kitchen… but no marijuana.
Before making their escape, the two intruders destroyed the home phone and left Lightner bound and gagged in the bedroom, which he eventually managed to cut himself loose from using a pair of nearby scissors. Once he was free, he drove down to a local grocery store and had an employee call for help.
When police arrived, an officer reportedly smelled marijuana in the residence, which ultimately led to authorities coming back with search warrant. Inside the ransacked room of Nicholas Lightner, police found a “trace” of marijuana, a debit card, and a digital scale – all of which was seized as evidence.
Interestingly, while Raleigh police should be working to find out the identity of the two hooligans who broke into Lightner’s home and held him at gunpoint, the investigation seems to have steered more towards Nicholas Lightner’s possession of a small amount of marijuana. Yet, no charges have been filed.
Bruce Lightner recently took to the social media to thank his local community for their outpouring of support, calling the experience “terrifying” while indicating the pot-scavenging intruders should consider themselves lucky to be alive. “The theifs were on me before I could pull my “heat” from under the mattress,” he said. “Guess even funeral homes are not safe these days.”
Mike Adams writes for stoners and smut enthusiasts in High Times, Playboy’s The Smoking Jacket and Hustler Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @adamssoup and on Facebook/mikeadams73.
