Residents React To Big Pot Bust

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Story Published: May 22, 2008 at 10:47 PM PST

By Robin Woodson

ZILLAH/OUTLOOK -- "That's too many plants, like you said 10,000, that's way too many, yeah, no, that's scary," Zillah resident, Celso Alvarez, said.

For neighbors along East Zillah and Dekker Road, a big pot bust Thursday afternoon is the kind of thing the town rarely hears about.

"It's just a shock, it's wow, it's a really big surprise," said Teodora Martinez-Chavez. She lives on Dekker Road.

When asked "You never would have suspected something like that was going on?" Alvarez replied "No, no, no, I mean this area, no. That's a lot of drugs on the street."

The discovery started when the Law Enforcement Against Drugs Task Force, or L.E.A.D, got a tip about a cornfield in the area with more than 10,000 small pot plants in the ground.

Detectives say if the illegal plants had grown to full size, they would have had a street value of about $10 million bucks.

"Definitely concerned that people that were willing to do that on such a high scale live so near us," Martinez-Chavez said.

It's even scarier for residents that they can't tell exactly which field the crop came from.

Action News learned it's too early in the season for corn and there aren't many fields planted yet.

"We don't have a place, I mean you can see it, it's open land," Alvarez said.

"It makes me feel, personally, that I guess I didn't know my neighbors quite as well as I thought I did," Martinez-Chavez said.

Action News couldn't get in touch with reps from L.E.A.D.

The case is still under investigation.

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