TRMC sponsors playground equipment to area schools
November 22, 2017
TURKEYS DOWN, VEGGIES STABLE THIS HOLIDAY
November 28, 2017
Terrebonne Parish drug agents working with Drug Enforcement Agency operatives smashed a local heroin distribution ring last week.
In addition to three arrests — with more expected — more than 3.5 pounds of heroin was seized, with a street value in excess of $226,000.
Sheriff Jerry Larpenter praised the work of his deputies, who had engineered the bust during weeks of coordinating with federal agents, and said that for now some amount of a deadly drug is unavailable.
“It fuels the addictions of people, but there are alternative drugs,” he said of the heroin. “People start abusing narcotics and the addiction is getting worse and worse and the ultimate high is when you overdose. It is a form of suicide.”
At least 48 fatal drug overdoses have been logged in Terrebonne Parish so far this year, Larpenter said.
Part of the operation involved a mid-day car-stop on busy Martin Luther King Boulevard near Hollywood Road Friday. A powder-blue Chevrolet sedan was boxed in by unmarked police vehicles; officers with SHERIFF and DEA stenciled on the back of their exterior body armor swarmed the vehicle with guns drawn. There was no resistance.
“They never had a chance to resist,” one officer later said.
Arrested were Tyree Gray, 22; Darnell Diggs III and Corey Lewis, both 21-years-old. All are from Houma and frequented the east side, on the outskirts of Mechanicville.
Through what were described as “investigational tactics and physical surveillance” officers were able to disrupt the buy while it was in progress at a hotel. They apprehended one of the suspects with the heroin in a draw-string backpack. Other officers followed the vehicle and made the stop shortly thereafter.
Drug agents who worked the case said they took some comfort in getting that much product off the streets before it ever had a chance to get broken down and sold to individuals. But they also acknowledged that in no time more will replace it.
Drug agents said the $226,000 estimate was based on street value of the entire 3.5 pounds in their possession. That product, they said, could have ended up cut, or “stepped on” two or three times with additives, raising the value to as much as three quarters of a million dollars.
“We need stricter laws,” Larpenter said. “This poison is not being grown in America, it is coming from abroad. Last year in this country 62,000 people died. That’s more people than we lost in Vietnam during the whole war.”
