NEW CARLISLE — It started Saturday evening with a bullet piercing a trucker’s windshield along the Indiana Toll Road. It ended later that night as a neighbor — the one suspected of shooting that bullet — was arrested when a state conservation officer found a marijuana grow operation in the man’s basement.

The 53-year-old man was arrested at his home in the 53000 block of Auten Road, just east of the St. Joseph/LaPorte county line, and booked into the St. Joseph County Jail, said Officer Shawn Brown of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

Several pounds of marijuana, grow lights and the man’s rifle were seized, Brown said.

The trucker, Marcus Allen of South Bend, was hauling auto parts with his semi tractor from Gary to Toledo, Ohio, when the bullet shot through his windshield and lodged into the passenger-side door, shattering the door’s glass.

He wasn’t hurt, but he told a WSBT reporter: "Fortunately, my wife wasn't with me because sometimes she might ride with me, and it just passed through where the passenger might have been sitting."

Brown explains that, as an Indiana State Police officer talked with Allen, an officer with the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Department approached a hunter in a nearby field. The hunter said he hadn’t shot anything but pointed out a house where he’d heard a couple of shots.

Brown said the county officer knocked at that house, and the man living there said he’d shot at a couple of deer on his property. The officer called Brown to the property. Brown said the man told him he’d shot toward the bottom of the hill, not up toward the Toll Road. But Brown said the bullet’s trajectory seemed to come from the man’s house.

Inviting Brown into his house, the man showed the rifle he used, which Brown said isn’t the type that’s legal for hunting. Brown said he smelled marijuana and asked the man about it. The man admitted to Brown that he was smoking pot — and that he’d been smoking it for 30 years, Brown said.

Brown said he first found a canister with about 60 grams of pot (enough for a felony, he said). As Brown looked around, he said, he found about eight bags of packaged marijuana, and the county officer found 10 more bags.
The officers searched the house and, in the basement, found about 30 medium-sized marijuana plants under grow lights, plus about 100 starter plants in a shower, Brown said.

Outside, he said, the officers found a small building where there were three 30-gallon containers full of dried marijuana.

Brown said he seized all of the marijuana and grow lights and the rifle.