Pittsburg police detectives served a search warrant on Wednesday 15 July 2015 at a house in the 900 block of Promenade Drive after what the department called a lengthy investigation into a suspected hash oil lab.[1] Officers arrested five people on suspicion of producing hash oil, four of them residents of the home.[1] The five were named by police as Adam Schiebrel, Michelle Alekseyev, Jeffrey Bellesiles, Kevin Muish and Nicholas Lawton, all between the ages of 24 and 30.[2]

The operation used almost every room of the house, with rooms to grow marijuana, rooms to extract THC from the plant, and storage and packing rooms, police said.[2] Police said they seized about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) of finished hash oil that they estimated had a street value of about $750,000, along with about $30,000 in cash that may have come from sales of the product.[1] Lt. Patrick Wentz said detectives found what they believed was the county’s largest honey oil lab, and perhaps the state’s largest found by law enforcement.[1] NBC Bay Area reported that heavy equipment and marijuana plants were also seized and that the house was tagged as dangerous.[3]

Jeffrey Bellesiles and another resident were released by police to move things out of the home, and Bellesiles said everyone there was a medical marijuana patient and he was not sure why they were being charged.[3] Detectives said they were trying to establish how long the operation had run and how long the residents had lived there, and that the case would go to the district attorney for review.[2] One suspect’s car had a hidden compartment, which police said is often used to hide illegal items.[1]

Bay City News, whose account the CBS and ABC7 stories reproduced, described the house as perhaps the largest hash or honey oil lab found in Contra Costa County.[4]