A traffic stop along Interstate 75 in Monroe County turned up 10 pounds of fentanyl on Tuesday afternoon, enough to represent roughly 2.26 million potentially lethal doses, and left a Sanford, Florida man booked into jail without bond on trafficking charges.
Monroe County deputies stopped Gleen Kee's vehicle around 4:10 p.m. on Interstate 75, according to WSB-TV. Deputies deployed a K-9 during the stop, and the dog alerted to the presence of drugs inside the car, authorities said. A search then turned up the 10 pounds of fentanyl, and Kee now faces fentanyl trafficking charges along with miscellaneous traffic charges, per the same report. He was booked into the Monroe County Jail and is being held without bond.
The math behind that seizure is staggering. Federal authorities consider just 2 milligrams of fentanyl a potentially fatal dose for most people, depending on body size and tolerance, according to the DEA. Ten pounds works out to roughly 4,536 grams of the drug — meaning the stop pulled an amount capable of killing more than 2 million people off the interstate in a single afternoon.
A Highway Corridor Under Heavy Watch
Tuesday's bust was not an isolated event for Monroe County deputies this month. Two days earlier, on October 11, deputies stopped an SUV along the same highway and arrested a Jonesboro driver, seizing three pounds of marijuana, four ecstasy pills, and a drone meant for a prison contraband drop; the suspect in that case briefly fled on foot during the search, the sheriff's office said in a Facebook post. A week before that, on October 6, deputies attempted a stop near the same Exit 188 that escalated into a vehicle pursuit and the arrest of a Florida driver suspected of trying to fly a drone drug delivery into a state prison, as reported by 13WMAZ.
Sheriff Brad Freeman noted that prison contraband drops have become a growing problem along that stretch of highway, according to the 13WMAZ report. Monroe County sits roughly midway between Atlanta and Macon along I-75, a north-south corridor linking Florida to Atlanta and the East Coast, which is why deputies there routinely intercept large-scale narcotics shipments and prison contraband, per Report Lookup county records.
Georgia's Harsher Fentanyl Penalties
Kee's arrest comes under a tougher legal landscape than existed just a few years ago. Georgia's Fentanyl Eradication and Removal Act, also known as the FEAR Act or SB 79, took effect July 1, 2025, and set a mandatory minimum sentence of 35 years in prison along with a $750,000 fine for trafficking 28 grams or more of fentanyl, according to reporting from a Cobb County criminal defense firm. Because 10 pounds vastly exceeds that 28-gram threshold, Kee faces mandatory prison time if convicted under state law.
The state also passed Austin's Law, or Senate Bill 465, in April 2024, creating the felony charge of aggravated involuntary manslaughter for people who supply fentanyl that causes a fatal overdose, carrying 10 to 30 years or even life in prison. That statute removed the requirement that prosecutors prove a distributor knew a substance contained fentanyl, as explained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lawmakers pushed both measures as fentanyl deaths climbed statewide: CDC data cited by the Georgia State University Law Review shows fentanyl-related overdose deaths in Georgia rose from 1,726 in 2022 to 2,649 in 2023.
Part of a Larger Pattern of Interdictions
This is not the first time Monroe and neighboring counties have made headlines for large-scale drug seizures. Back in April, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office joined Butts County authorities and regional law enforcement for Operation Gate-Keeper, a months-long probe that led to 32 arrests and the seizure of hundreds of pounds of methamphetamine, along with cocaine, marijuana, fentanyl, and illegal firearms across central Georgia and metro Atlanta.
Nationally, the scale of the fentanyl crisis dwarfs even these local busts. The DEA seized more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and over 47 million fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills during 2025 alone, with federal officials estimating that a single kilogram of fentanyl powder can contain up to 500,000 lethal doses. It remains unclear where Tuesday's shipment originated or where it was headed, and whether Kee was working alone or as part of a larger trafficking network.
