A city employee had found a marijuana plot along a creek on the city farm in the woods behind the sewage treatment plant and notified the Kerrville Police Department. Danny (another detective) and I were assigned to catch whoever was tending the plot. We met at KPD one morning early and headed out, expecting to work a long day’s surveillance.
As we were walking along the creek in the area described by the worker, Danny heard a noise and motioned me down. We both fell to the ground. I was about thirty feet uphill from the creek and crouched behind a bush. Danny was right at the creekbank and fell flat behind a log barely big enough to hide his body.
Watching through the bush, I saw a guy come out of the brush on the other side of the creek. He was carrying two empty white plastic pails, one in each hand, and was headed to the stream to fill the buckets. As luck would have it, he went to a spot directly across the stream from Danny’s hiding spot. He stooped to dip water less than five feet from Danny.
The guy was filling the bucket when Danny decided to make his move. He jumped up from behind the log, pistol drawn, and shouted “POLICE! FREEZE!” The poor kid was so startled he threw his hands up, but he was still grasping the buckets. The bucket he was filling, now half full of water, went straight toward Danny.
About three gallons of water hit Danny full on. His extended right hand holding his gun was dead center in the path of the water. From my vantage point, my main memory is of water pouring back out of the barrel of Danny’s gun with the kid across the creek standing frozen, his arms stretching straight up towards the sky.
Danny recovered quickly and handcuffed the kid, who, it turned out, had just turned a legal adult. We marched him back up the hill where, maybe fifty yards from the creek, he had his pot patch. There were about 18 plants, all three to four feet high, with leaves and flower buds coated white with insecticide powder. I couldn’t believe he planned on smoking all that poison!
We needed to pull up the plants to take with us, but had to do something to detain the kid in the meantime, so Danny handcuffed him to a tree limb that was about 7 feet above the ground. We began pulling the plants with him watching.
I was stunned by the kid’s reaction. He went absolutely hysterical. He began crying and sobbing and begging us not to kill his plants. You would have thought we were torturing his dog to death! The despair and distress in his pleas was pathetic. I was baffled how anybody could be so emotionally attached to a bunch of plants. He wasn’t angry so much as simply out of control with excruciating mental anguish.
Once we had harvested all of his plants, I carried them while Danny escorted the crying kid to our car. The case never went to trial, so I believe he must have pled guilty. In the late 1970s when this occurred, it was a felony with a lengthy sentence. Worse, I think, would have been smoking all of that insecticide.