Law enforcement officials in Ohio have compiled a sufficiently solid case against three suspects to secure their indictment for having flown drones to provide inmates in multiple prisons around the state with narcotics and other contraband items.
State officials obtained the 116-count felony indictment against the three men following an investigation dating back to 2021. Among those are charges the trio used drones to drop drugs, weapons, mobile phones, and other banned items into at least five different prisons or detention centers across Ohio.
The activity is part of an increasing problem of UAVs being deployed to supply internal penitentiary blackmarkets with contraband items across the US and around the globe.
Read: Illicit drone delivery of contraband to global prisons soared in 2022
The Ohio case dates back to the May 2021 discovery of a drone that had been used to transport prohibited items into a Toledo correctional facility. After a six-month investigation, police raided the Columbus apartment of one of the suspects behind the operation, turning up $319,820 worth of drugs and other materials officials believed were to soon be flown into prisons.
After a year and a half of continued inquiry, law enforcement authorities built a sufficiently tight case against the three suspects to indict them for operating a drone-based trafficking operation into several Ohio prisons.
Among the charges are possession of cocaine and a fentanyl-based substances; of criminal materials; weapons offenses; engagement in a pattern of corrupt activities; and related illegal actions.
Read: Drones drop explosives in Ecuador prison attack by suspected drug cartels
Police and correctional authorities in Ohio reportedly called the indictments a clear sign the state was successfully cracking down on use of drones to ferry banned substances into state prisons. Those jails and detention centers witnessed 14 overdose deaths between 2018 and 2022, and a total of 762 ODs requiring Narcan treatments between 2020 and the middle of last year.
Read: Drones suspected of banned substance drops to Ontario prison
That illicit drone activity and the ravages it has inflicted inside prisons have been rapidly rising in recent years across the US, Canada, and the globe. As a result, habitual but increasingly obsolete safeguards like visual detection, netting over facility grounds, and even early versions of UAV detection tech are being updated with full-range identification and mitigation platforms that can spot and neutralize approaching UAVs, and locate their pilots for arrest.
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