Drug agents seize 150 pounds of marijuana bound for Kentucky

SUMNER COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) — A man previously arrested in Missouri for transporting large quantities of marijuana has been arrested again.

This time, he was arrested in Sumner County, Tennessee with 150 pounds of it. The incident happened on July 23. Members of the 18th Judicial Drug Task Force (JDTF) pulled over a Dodge Durango for following another vehicle too closely on Interstate 65 North.

The agent said that the minute he approached the driver’s side window, he smelled marijuana.

“I smelled a slight odor of marijuana when I initially made contact with them,” the agent said.

The agent asked the driver, 26-year-old Skyler Ramon Healey, and the passenger, Lucas Matthew Counts, 25, if they smoked marijuana or if there might be some inside the rental vehicle.

Over and over again, the California men said no. On body camera footage, you could hear their interaction. Healey denied using marijuana.

“No marijuana,” Healey said in the body camera footage. “You can drug test me now.”

Counts shook his head when an agent asked why they could smell marijuana coming from the vehicle.

The agent then asked if he could search the car and Healey said no. That’s when the agent ran K9 Emma, a drug dog, around the vehicle.

The agent told News 2 that the smell was so overwhelming, the dog alerted multiple times on multiple parts of the vehicle. When agents looked inside, they found 150 “one pound” bricks — triple sealed — containing high-grade marijuana.

“Oh son, it is loaded loaded,” the agent said in the video.

According to drug agents, this was not Healey’s first brush with highway interdiction.

In 2019, published reports indicated that Healey was stopped by the Missouri State Highway Patrol with 53 vacuum sealed bags of marijuana on Interstate 70 in Lafayette County. According to Radio KMMO, he was charged with delivery of a controlled substance.

“I asked him on separate occasions if there was any marijuana in the vehicle, why the vehicle smelled like marijuana, if he uses marijuana — to see if he would be truthful and honest with me,” the agent said. “He lied to me on numerous occasions about that.”

The agent said that he was extremely proud of Emma’s work on the case.

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“Anytime I can deploy her and be successful and get this type of large amount of narcotics off the street, that is invaluable,” the agent added.

The two California men are currently in the Sumner County jail. Their bonds: close to $900,000 each. According to interdiction agents, had the marijuana made it to its destination, it would have had a street value of around $1.3 million.

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