Police in Miami Beach arrested a man on Tuesday who is suspected of killing four people last weekend at an Oklahoma cannabis farm, the Associated Press reports.
The suspect, Wu Chen, was taken into custody without incident yesterday “after a car tag reader flagged vehicle (sic) he was driving,” the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) said in a Facebook post. He is expected to be extradited back to Oklahoma where he will be charged with murder and shooting with intent to kill.
The still unidentified murder victims include three men and one woman, all Chinese citizens, who authorities say appear to have been “executed.” Their bodies were discovered Sunday night on a 10-acre licensed cannabis farm west of Hennessey, about 55 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, according to the report. A fifth victim, also a Chinese citizen, survived the attack and was brought to a hospital.
Following the discovery, investigating authorities in Oklahoma said that they had a suspect in mind for the quadruple homicide but they withheld the name for safety purposes.
“The suspect was inside that building for a significant amount of time before the executions began,” OSBI said in a news release on Tuesday. “Based on the investigation thus far, this does not appear to be a random incident.”
Local police had initially responded to a reported hostage situation, according to the report.
A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority confirmed to the AP there was an active medical cannabis cultivation license registered to the location of the murders but officials did not identify the business.
“It being a marijuana farm, obviously Oklahoma state law requires that they have a license from the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority and from us. One of the things we’re looking at is, is it obtained legally or was it obtained by fraud? So that’ll be part of our investigation.” — Mark Woodward, spokesman for The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control
Oklahoma voted to legalize medical cannabis in 2018 and the industry expanded quickly at first thanks to the state’s looser licensing restrictions than most other U.S. medical cannabis programs.
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