2 Teens Busted Trying to Launch Meth Into Louisiana Prison With a Cannon

A pair of real go-getters from Colorado who think outside the box were arrested for trying to smuggle drugs and tobacco into a Louisiana prison using a compressed air cannon that sounds an awful lot like the kind more colloquially referred to as a T-shirt cannon.

The smugglers were not successful in their attempt to launch meth and cigarettes over the prison’s security fence, even though the cannon they were using was capable of shooting items over 350 feet.

Of the compressed air cannon used by 19-year-old Angel Gonzales and 18-year-old José Francisco Herrera Munoz, Grant Parish Sheriff Steven McCain said it “was not something that was homemade. It was bought, and it was professionally manufactured, and it’s very powerful.”

To me, a commercially made compressed air cannon does not sound like anything other than the T-shirt cannons used to launch graphic tees into the crowd at basketball games. While the sheriff did not explicitly call it a T-shirt cannon, I think we can all agree this was a T-shirt cannon that, in less criminal hands, would be launching Denver Nuggets novelty tees into the crowd during halftime.

The T-shirt cannon duo wasn’t planning on shooting over a few packs of smokes and a couple of baggies of crystal. They were attempting to shoot $112,000 worth of tobacco and $89,500 worth of meth over the prison fence. A complete record of the most valuable payloads ever fired out of a T-shirt cannon understandably does not exist, but I’d guess a payload of $201,500 worth of meth and tobacco has to be near the top of the list.

The legitimately brilliant plan was foiled by a real cock blocker of a deputy who noticed some suspicious activity. Two teens lugging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of addictive chemicals into a federal prison with a T-shirt cannon I think safely falls under the definition of suspicious. Can’t think of too many ways to disguise that kind of suspicious activity as anything other than what is.

There’s just something so visually distinct about the image of a T-shirt cannon being used to launch drugs and tobacco into a prison. Sure, you could mistake it for the two men trying to fire a rocket launcher at the prison in what would be phase 1 of an especially bold prison break, but for some reason, air cannon as a means of drug trafficking makes more sense as a first thought.

Authorities say the introduction of that much meth into the prison would have been devastating to the prison community, which is likely true. So of course, it’s good that these two men were ultimately detained before they had the chance to successfully execute their plan. But as far as plans themselves go, context removed from the potential ravaging of a prison ecosystem with highly addictive drugs, it’s a solid plan that sounds like a very fun time.