Thursday, August 12th 2021, 9:42 pm
A grow operation raid went wrong, according to a marijuana farmer who said law enforcement caused millions in damage because of a mix-up.
“The cops just started going right to work. They hired a landscape crew to come in and start chopping stuff down so right away they went right to work and didn’t let anyone ask questions,” said Rodney Topkov, The CEO of Earth Research Labs.
He said he woke up to videos of Lincoln County District Attorney's Task Force destroying his crops.
“You never think in a million years that you would be getting a phone call from workers saying you don’t have the proper paperwork,” he said.
Topkov said there is over $10-million worth of damage.
“They destroyed all of our drip line irrigation, our stakes, t-posts, the whole trellising to hold the plants up. They pushed everything into a pile and destroyed that garden. That garden was supposed to be valued at $3-4 million,” he said.
He said another garden was also destroyed.
News 9 spoke to the district attorney’s office who said they had a search warrant from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics to complete the raid.
“Our initial check of the system did not find anything but a second check this morning on a different database did reveal that this was a licensed facility,” said Mark Woodward with OBN.
He said the confusion stemmed from a database change back in July.
“Agencies now must summit in writing the request for that business. Then there will be multiple searches by multiple people in both databases until all the data has been moved over,” said Woodward.
Topkov wants to know who's to blame.
“We need to get what we worked for fixed and get us back to par,” he said.
OBN said they will have to wait and see who will cover the damage.
August 12th, 2021
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