LAWTON – An out-of-state man who allegedly ran a red light in front of a Lawton police officer and tried to evade arrest was found to be transporting 80 pounds of black-market marijuana.
Eric Shantrell Sanders, 38, of Kent, Washington, is named in four charges filed in Comanche County District Court: trafficking in illegal drugs, a felony, and misdemeanor counts of attempting to elude a police officer, failure to stop at a red light, and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties.
In an affidavit, LPD Patrol Lt. John Schwenk wrote that he was driving north on 38th Street, approaching Rogers Lane, when an eastbound automobile blew through the intersection (the northbound traffic signal was green at the time).
Schwenk said he pursued the car through multiple residential areas, and at one point the chase reached a speed of 63 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone. After the driver finally stopped, he resisted arrest, the officer wrote.
Based on a telephone conversation Sanders had with an unidentified man that was overheard in the jail by Detective Jeffrey McCoy, Detective Christopher Hally led “K-9 Juliet” to conduct an “open-air sniff” of the vehicle Sanders was driving. After Hally received a “positive alert” from the dog “for the odor of narcotics coming from the vehicle,” Comanche County Special Judge Susan Zwaan signed a search warrant.
In the vehicle’s center console were found paperwork showing the vehicle was rented at Seattle International Airport to a “Jem Chen,” and 22 grams of medical marijuana, McCoy reported.
In the trunk were four large black trash bags which contained “a large amount of marijuana” that weighed 80 pounds, he said. Inside each bag were approximately 20 individually wrapped 1-pound bags of the substance.
Bond was set at $300,000 cash for Sanders – who was convicted of hitand- run injury and vehicular assault in Washington in 2017, court records show. A preliminary hearing conference in his case is scheduled for July 29 before Judge Zwaan.