Local News in Brief : Costa Mesa : Man Held on Suspicion of Growing Marijuana
Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies arrested a 33-year-old Costa Mesa resident Wednesday after they found an elaborate cultivation setup for marijuana being grown under artificial lights beneath his two-story home, officials said.
Kent Sandlin, 33, was taken to the Norwalk sheriff’s station and was being held on $100,000 bail on suspicion of felony possession and cultivation of marijuana, sheriff’s spokesman Hal Grant said.
Concluding a monthlong investigation, half a dozen Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies presented a search warrant Wednesday afternoon at Sandlin’s home at 295 1/2 Broadway, Costa Mesa.
There, in a 7-foot-deep pit beneath his house, they found an illegal crop valued at $100,000, Grant said. Deputies uprooted and confiscated 500 marijuana plants--some of them seedlings, others up to 5 feet tall.
“We put that farm out of business,” Grant said.
Sandlin, who reportedly described himself as self-employed, was at home at the time and arrested without incident.
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