(Updated 4:29 p.m.) “It’s amazing. It’s amazing,” exclaimed Ray Pearson, upon learning that a massive “illegal grow operation” was running next door to the home-daycare center he runs on a quiet Westville block. Police Friday afternoon were removing hundreds of plants and placing the house’s owners under arrest.
Pearson (pictured) and other neighbors had no idea at first why the police were raiding 1853 – 1855 Chapel St. across from the Yale Bowl Friday.
They discovered that nobody had been living on the first floor of that building. Instead, pot plants were growing and drying and being processed inside the aluminum-lined walls of the apartment.
Armed with a search warrant, members of the police department’s Tactical Narcotics Unit (TNU) spent Friday afternoon removing both the drugs and equipment from the apartment.
As of 4 p.m., they had carted away 206 marijuana plants and 47 1/2 pounds of bud, the mostly highly concentrated, powerful and commercially valuable part of the plant, according to Sgt. Rob Criscuolo of the TNU. He said the bud all came from one room in the house — there were two more rooms full of the stuff yet to cart away. He estimated that the raid could end up netting more than 100 pounds of bud.
Earlier in the day, the owners of the house “voluntarily” answered detectives’ questions down at police headquarters at 1 Union Ave., according to Criscuolo.
The owners — a man and his wife — live on the second floor of the house with a 15-year-old girl, Criscuolo said. The man and his daughter were at home on the second floor Thursday night when firefighters responded to a report of a small electrical fire outside the building.
At the scene the firefighters found the first-floor apartment door open — and the marijuana operation inside. Police showed up next. The man and the girl on the second floor agreed to spend the night in a hotel. Then they and the man’s girlfriend agreed to an interview with detectives Friday.
Late Friday afternoon police escorted the man and woman into separate vehicles and arrested them for theft of electricity.
The cops arrested them one at a time around 4 p.m. and led them into separate vehicles. First they arrested the woman (pictured with her head down, being escorted by Det. Elisa Tuozzoli). In between the two arrests, the 15-year-old daughter came home, in tears. Police brought her inside to speak briefly with her father before he, too, was led away.
Criscuolo said the couple had been tapping into electrical wires — and that’s what caused a small fire that first brought firefighters to the house Thursday evening around 8:30. The fire broke out on wires leading to the second floor of the house. That’s how the marijuana operation came to light.
“They were overloading the system. It was getting fried,” Criscuolo said. The stolen electricity powered not just the second-floor apartment, according to Criscuolo, but the elaborate first-floor drug operation too.
The owners rent the first floor to another woman, who wasn’t present Thursday or Friday, according to police. Criscuolo said the police hadn’t located the woman as of mid-Friday. He said the couple owning the home denied both knowing about the drug operation or stealing electricity.
“They’re being cooperative,” Criscuolo (pictured) said. “It’s hard to believe they didn’t know what was going on.”
Although a woman has a lease with the owners for the first floor, there was no sign of anyone living there, Criscuolo said. There was no furniture on the first floor, and extensive materials to grow and dry marijuana, he explained.
A brief walk-through of the apartment by reporters Friday afternoon indeed revealed no furniture, lots of equipment, and marijuana everywhere. Growing plants filled one aluminum-foil-lined bedroom (pictured).
Discarded leaves littered a foyer floor.
Plants dried from the ceiling in another bedroom. Tupperware containers on the floor collected buds that had apparently been cut from the hanging plants.
The bathroom, too, had apparently been put to productive use.
Reichard (pictured) said that at first glance, the operation appears that it may be even bigger than the alleged pot factory the cops raided on Dwight Street on Sept. 9. They netted $500,000 worth of plants in that raid. (Click here for a story on that raid and, in the comments section below, a description by TNU chief Lt. John Velleca of how the cops calculate the value of seized plants.)
Neighbors interviewed on the block said they had no idea that an alleged drug factory was operating there, although Christine Johnson said that she would sometimes pick up “an odd odor” on the block that she couldn’t identify. Johnson is pictured talking to reporters and holding Baylor, her Newfoundland, and Buffy, a bichon frise (a whole lot smaller, and not visible in the photo).
Johnson lives next door to 1853 – 1855 Chapel going east. “We never really saw tenants living there,” she said. “you would see people coming and going, but not really living there. No one bothered me.”
She called the news “disconcerting. We feel we live in a nice neighborhood. We had no idea a drug-related thing was going on.”
Morning Glory, Ray Pearson’s home day-care center, operates in the house immediately next door to 1855 Chapel heading west.
Pearson (pictured) said 23 children aged 3 to 5 attend the center. It has operated for 18 or 19 years, he said.
“It’s been so quiet — wow. Right next door!” Pearson said Friday afternoon upon learning why cops were on the block. He said he planned to inform parents of the news.
Haydee Mejias (pictured) said she used to live in that first-floor apartment being raided Friday. In April she and her boyfriend moved a few doors down the block after their lease expired, she said.
Members of the narcotics unit hung around the premises Friday morning for hours waiting for the search warrant to be drawn up, then signed. They got the green light around 11 a.m. First they videotaped the apartment in the condition they’d found it. Then they went about removing individual items and photographing them. They planned to make a final video of the apartment after it had been cleared out.
Assistant Chief Reichard, who served as Westville’s top cop from 2000 to 2006, said serious criminal activity is rare in that stretch of the neighborhood.
The two-family 3,726-square-foot house was built in 1920.
Legalize and tax it.