By Martha Jacob –
Ripley Police Chief Joel Barnett has released an update on an ongoing drug investigation by his department.
“After a four week long investigation our department has made several arrests in the trafficking of Heroin,” Chief Barnett said. “More importantly we’ve made a hit on trafficking of heroin which contains carfentanil (elephant tranquilizer) which has resulted in several overdoses in our village as well as in the Village of Aberdeen.”
Chief Barnett explained that the overdoses taking place in Ripley were during the same timeline as the large scale of overdoses in the Cincinnati area.
“The Ripley Police Department tries to always be very vigilant on this fight against drugs,” Barnett said. “We decided to focus everything possible on this heroin coming into Ripley that was killing people. We know that we can’t stop it completely, but we knew we could definitely slow it down and make people think twice before coming into Ripley to sell drugs.”
Barnett explained that during the four week investigation his department was able to pinpoint who the heroin was being sold by and others who were involved that were traveling to Cincinnati every day up to three times a day bringing multiple grams of heroin to Brown County, not just Ripley.
“We also didn’t just stop at the local people selling heroin in the village,” Barnett said, “We also went after the dealers, that these people were going to and bringing back heroin to the village and Brown County. We were able to place two very big dealers from Cincinnati in the jail for the trafficking of heroin.
“These two individuals were found in multiple local dealers contacts as their supplier that they could contact any time to purchase multiple grams of heroin to bring to Brown County.”
The Ripley Police Department has seized a couple thousand dollars, 3 vehicles were taken and 10 grams of heroin are now off the streets. The heroin’s estimated value is about $4,000.
Barnett said that he will continue in his efforts to clean Ripley’s streets of drugs and with the addition of a new K9 Unit, his job just became a little easier.