A Texas man was arrested Saturday, March 7, 2026, after federal agents found 75 pounds of marjuana packed in his suitcases on a flight from Miami International Airport to London, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee/TNS
A Texas man was arrested after U.S. Customs agents found 75 pounds of marijuana packed in his checked suitcases on board a flight from Miami International Airport to London Saturday afternoon, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
Harrison O’Neill Tiernan, 23, was boarding a British Airways flight at MIA bound for Heathrow Airport around 4:45 p.m. when Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him to question him about his luggage, his arrest report says.
Agents had already checked his Samsonite and American Flyer suitcases and found 65 individually wrapped vacuum-sealed bags containing a “leafy substance” that later tested positive for marijuana, according to the report. The report does not say Tiernan’s luggage was specifically targeted, but rather bags on that flight were being checked “due to high trend of narcotics being smuggled outbound from USA,” detectives wrote in the report.
Customs initially turned over the case to a U.S. Homeland Security Investigations agent, who declined it because the amount of drugs did not meet “the federal threshold,” the report states. The sheriff’s office then became the lead agency for the case, according to the report.
Tiernan, from Austin, declined to speak with detectives without a lawyer. As of Monday, he was waiting for a judge to set bond while held at Metro West Detention Center on a marijuana-trafficking charge. Information on his legal counsel was not immediately available.
Miami Herald
David Goodhue covers the Florida Keys and South Florida for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald. Before joining the Herald, he covered Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.