| Prohibition has many faces |
If you are wondering why it is taking so long to legalize cannabis in America, you have supreme dumbasses like 24-year old Patrick Wayne Austin of Missoula, Montana to thank.
Blasting cans of compressed and highly flammable butane gas through a weed-filled tube indoors? Check. Doing it in an apartment building? Check. Doing it with a child in the house? Check. Posting about your wacky adventures as an “extract artist” on social media sites like Facebook? Check mate.
Just after 4:20pm on Sunday, police and firefighters responded to reports of an explosion and fire at a student housing apartment complex on the campus of the University of Montana.
Three people were found at the scene of the accident, including Austin, 18-year old Victoria Ervin, and Ervin’s 19-month old baby. All three had suffered serious 2nd and 3rd degree burns from whatever had happened inside the apartment.
All of the windows had been blown out of the ground zero apartment, as well as some windows of adjoining units, scattering broken glass across the lawn outside. Austin had taken the brunt of the damage, but Ervin and her baby both had their hair burnt off of their heads and were all three were being treated as law enforcement teams entered the apartment to try to determine what had happened.
According to the affidavit prepared from an interview Austin gave while recovering at the hospital, he claimed that there was an explosion in the house that must have been caused by some sort of gas leak.
When police made their way into the obliterated apartment, they saw cannabis strewn all over the place – over a pound and a half in total. They also found a half a pound of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Besides the unregistered rifle found on the scene, the smoking gun was the cases of butane cans, the hot plate (still switched ON) with the pyrex dish on top, and the 8.3 grams of finish product cannabis oil that was also found inside.
So, what about all the butane? Austin told police that he keeps it backstocked for personal use to fill his lighter with. Brilliant.
In his own last line of defense, Austin said it’s not how it looks, that he used to blast wax out of weed, but that he learned his lesson and quit after getting injured and burning down a shed while attempting the process on an earlier occasion.
Somehow, Missoula police were not convinced by Austin’s half-baked plea of ignorance, and now he is facing five felony charges; including endangering a child, manufacturing and distributing dangerous drugs, and more.
As for Ervin, police have filed a misdemeanor charge of child endangerment so far, and her child was taken away immediately by Child Protective Services.
After having her baby taken from her, she wasted no time tossing Austin’s stupid ass directly under the bus, but hardly did herself any favors by admitting she was well aware of his dangerous activities in the apartment. She said that she would usually take the baby and leave while he was making the cannabis oil, but that on Sunday, she was “tired” so she just went in the other room with the kid. Somewhere around 15-30 minutes later, she heard the telltale ‘whoosh’ of the gas fumes igniting, and before she knew it, Ervin and her child were on fire.
Quite literally adding insult to injury, it took no time at all for law enforcement to access Austin’s very public Facebook page which featured him proudly showing off his glass dab rig, and openly posting updates about the highly illegal business that he ran out of Ervin’s on-campus living quarters.
On October 1st, Austin brazenly posted:
“The struggle is real.. Why does it seem so hard to find quality packs not so taxed. You spend 2800 on a pack and use 32 cans of butane and sell your oil for cheaper than 35 a g. o_0”
On the 7th, “the struggle” appeared to have gotten better:
“Its been a productive day and its not over yet. I will have multiple kinds of edibles on deck by tomorrow. I also have 7 flavors on deck I hope by tomorrow it will be 8 or possibly 9. Stoked. Grind hard friends because hard work does pay off”
On October 12th, he blew the fucking place up.
In his first appearance in court, Austin showed up without a lawyer, and turned on that same wook charm that had worked so well for him in the past, telling Judge Karen Orzech that he just wants to be “a productive member of society”.
Austin told the court, “I’m just not currently happy with my position in life, as the choices I have been making, so I want to change that.”
Instead he got slapped with a $50,000 bail, along with another $20,000 added on for a previous warrant for burglary.
If he somehow comes up with the cash and gets released before his October 28th preliminary hearing, he is forbidden from seeing either Ervin or her child, or from going back to the scene of the crime.
In the U.S. cannabis legalization movement, the struggle actually is real. Assholes blowing up apartments with babies inside and then lying to the cops as if they’re the one who have been huffing ‘tane for the past few years pushes the entire cause, and all of the legitimate work that is being done within it, backwards.
Patrick Wayne Austin and those like him do not represent us, and it’s time we began weeding them out ourselves before the police and paramedics have to get involved.