Duluth police seize meth, fentanyl and cash in traffic stop
A West 8th Street stop turned up meth, crack cocaine, fentanyl and cash, and Duluth police jailed the driver on multiple charges.
A Friday afternoon stop on the 500 block of West 8th Street quickly turned into a narcotics investigation after Duluth police spotted a suspicious vehicle and detained the two people inside.
Officers said the driver first gave a false name, and investigators saw signs that suggested impairment. A Drug Recognition Evaluator was brought in to assess whether the case involved a drug-related DWI issue before the search escalated further. Once K-9 Fitz was deployed, the dog alerted officers to illegal narcotics inside the vehicle.
What police say they found points to more than casual possession. The search allegedly turned up 105.49 grams of methamphetamine, 26.46 grams of crack cocaine, 1.39 grams of fentanyl and more than $2,700 in cash. The 45-year-old driver was lodged in the St. Louis County Jail pending multiple charges.
The seizure adds to a growing record for Fitz, a 1.5-year-old German Shepherd-Malinois mix from Hungary that Duluth police introduced as the fifth member of its K-9 Division. Fitz is named after the Edmund Fitzgerald and is trained for narcotic detection, tracking, article searching and criminal apprehension. Officer Shane McKee, who had six years with the Duluth Police Department and nine years of law-enforcement experience, began K-9 school with Fitz on Feb. 3, graduated on May 22 and started duty on May 26, 2025.
This was not Fitz’s first drug case. In his first deployment downtown on June 6, 2025, officers say he alerted on pizza boxes in a vehicle and helped uncover 1.76 grams of methamphetamine and 0.6 grams of fentanyl, leading to the custody of a 37-year-old on pending fifth-degree possession charges.
For Duluth police, the latest stop fits a larger enforcement picture in a city where fentanyl remains a public-safety concern and where the department is leaning on specialized tools to find drugs hidden in vehicles. The department says it is the third-largest municipal police department in Minnesota, with 158 authorized officers, and Fitz is one of five dogs now assigned to that work. The mix of methamphetamine, crack cocaine and fentanyl found on West 8th Street suggests a trafficking problem moving through city streets, not just isolated use, with the risks spreading across St. Louis County neighborhoods.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
