30 lbs of marijuana found on Florida beach

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office responded to reports of a package found on Ponte Vedra Beach Thursday at about 6 a.m. When they arrived on scene, a man said he found the package washed up on the shore.

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Deputies found the 12-by-12-inch taped bag contained large amounts of marijuana, which was later weighed at approximately 30 pounds.

“Most of those kinds of exchanges go on in the middle of the night,” SJSO Public Information Officer Chuck Mulligan said. “There’s no telling where at in the ocean this could have possibly occurred. It could have been off the coast of St. Johns County or it could have been somewhere in south Florida that drifted for days.”

SJSO said they reached out to other law enforcement agencies and the Drug Enforcement Administration to see if they have similar cases.

The package is being contained in a freezer as evidence. Mulligan said if they do not find any leads, then it will be scheduled to be destroyed.

"What we normally find is that these are either air-drops where an aircraft is dropping this in the ocean and there's a boat waiting to pick those packages up and one or two float away from them," Mulligan said. "Or it's an exchange of two boats and maybe a package falls overboard and floats away and they can't see it."

"Being so in close proximity to Central, South America, that we are many times a gateway to get it into the U.S.," he said. "So it's not uncommon for us to see this every once in a while, maybe once or twice a year in St. Johns County."

Cox Media Group