The owner of a THC extraction business is facing two charges of first-degree murder after an explosion last week at his facility in Oklahoma killed two people.
Emergency crews last Thursday responded to the blast near Sand Springs, Oklahoma. According to KTUL, the explosion was strong enough to completely blow out the ceiling and walls of the facility while damaging 25 nearby businesses. One employee was found dead at the scene and another died later from injuries sustained during the blast.
Now, Ryan Bassham, owner of Solos Extracts, has turned himself in after being charged with murder.
According to People, one of the victims told emergency responders that the facility, which was using butane during the extraction process, wasn’t properly ventilated and that the explosion happened after he unplugged something.
Weeks before the explosion, a fire marshal had ordered Solos to stop production at the facility after a failed inspection. One of the facility’s neighbors told authorities that CO2 levels in his business were extremely high and when he attempted to alert Bassham about the reading, he became “light headed” inside the Solos facility.
According to reports, Bassham, in addition to not keeping his facility up to code, did not have a proper license in Oklahoma, meaning that he was illegally manufacturing cannabis products.
The deadly explosion in Oklahoma comes after a similar incident last year injured two people in Maryland at a facility that was using propane and butane for extraction. In 2024, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed after an employee was killed by an exploding machine at an extraction facility in Oregon. In 2022, an explosion at a cannabis manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania injured six people.
