Man wanted on warrant out of Arkansas busted in Martin County with three pounds of Meth
(Daniel Thorr Gatlin, mugshot, and his 3 lbs. of Meth, Image credit: MCSO)
On January 5, Florida’s Martin County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) reported on the second of two major drug busts that took place in their Southeast Florida County in less than a week.
Yesterday, MCSO Special Investigations detectives along with Homeland Security Investigations, announced that this most recent seizure took large quantities of Methamphetamine off the streets. Just recently, the same county saw the largest batch of Fentanyl seized in their jurisdiction.
In this latest Meth related bust, 39-year old Daniel Thorr Gatlin, who was already a fugitive from justice, relied on public transportation to get to Martin County while he was carrying and transporting three pounds of high quality Meth that he claimed came from Mexico.
Gatlin said he has been to Martin County before and feared coming back to sell such large quantities of drugs, but he did anyway. As a result of getting busted while in town, he’s now looking at a new prison sentence. Gatlin, who hails from Arkansas, was recently released from prison and is affiliated with a known Mexican prison gang. He is currently wanted on a warrant in Arkansas for aggravated robbery.
In Martin County, Gatlin is now looking at a minimum mandatory sentence of 25-years in prison for trafficking narcotics and just had his bond set at over one million dollars. He is being held without bond on his extraditable warrant in Arkansas.
Referencing an earlier drug seizure that also went down in martin County, on December 28, 2023, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office reported that their deputies intercepted and confiscated 10,000 freshly pressed fentanyl pills with a street value of $300,000 – before those pills hit the streets in southern Florida. What the sheriff’s office described as “the largest Fentanyl bust in Martin County’s history,” went down on Wednesday, December 27.
The apprehensions and seizure happened in the parking lot of a retail shopping plaza on Federal Highway. Deputies arrested three men out of New York who brought the drugs in to Florida, And the Sheriff firmly believes that the three men are part of a larger drug trafficking organization.
Jeffry Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ortiz, 3o, Yelson Daniel Alvarez-Ortiz, 26, and Carlos Antonio Almonte-Melo, 36, all from New York, were arrested and charged with trafficking in fentanyl, which carries a minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years in prison.
For more on that story, see:
Largest Fentanyl bust ever goes down in Martin County, ~ Ace News Today
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(Source and arrest photo, cover, of Daniel Thorr Gatlin: Martin County Sheriff’s Office)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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