HANCOCK COUNTY — A vehicle following too closely and speeding in a construction zone on Interstate 70 led to a traffic stop and the discovery of 55 pounds of methamphetamine worth as much as $2 million.
The occupants of the vehicle, two brothers from California, told Indiana State Police troopers they were heading to Ohio to visit their grandmother and didn’t know anything about the drugs.
The most serious charge against the brothers carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years in prison.
According to a probable cause affidavit, at around 11:30 a.m. Friday, a trooper who was watching eastbound traffic pulled over a white Toyota Tacoma with an Oregon license plate for traffic violations. The driver, Luis Moreno-Gomez, told the officer he didn’t speak English and gave the trooper a Mexican driver’s license. Jose Moreno-Gomez, the passenger, did speak English and told the trooper they were driving a rental vehicle.
While the men were retrieving paperwork, the trooper saw a binder with a U.S. driver’s license for Luis. When the trooper asked Luis why he had given him a different driver’s license, the two became unusually nervous, the affidavit said. Luis began shaking.
A K9 officer was brought in, and the dog indicated drugs were in the pickup truck. Officials first found contraband concealed in the tailgate, the affidavit said. Officers located 10 packages wrapped in plastic and covered in what appeared to be axle grease, a common way to package and conceal bulk narcotics, officials noted in the report.
Officials then found another 12 packages under the truck bed. The substance tested positive for methamphetamine; in all, the packages weighed approximately 55 pounds.
The Hancock County Sheriff’s Department estimated the drugs had a street value of up to $2 million.
The brothers told investigators they had no idea about where the drugs came from and stuck to a story about going to visit their grandmother in Ohio. However, they were unsure of their grandmother’s name or where she lived, the affidavit said. An officer offered to have another officer drive to the grandmother’s house in case she was going to be worried since they were not going to make it, but the brothers declined the offer.
The two made their initial appearance in Hancock County Superior Court 1 on Monday, Aug. 2, where Magistrate Cody Coombs set a $400,000 surety bond for each of the defendants. They are scheduled for a pretrial conference in late August.
