Woman busted for cooking meth inside Tulsa Walmart

A woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma was arrested Thursday for trying to set up a meth lab inside a Walmart store.

Police said security footage showed Elizabeth Alisha Greta Halfmoon, 45, in the store for at least six hours gathering the chemicals needed to manufacture methamphetamine.

Halfmoon told officers she was "too broke to buy the chemicals" and take them out of the store.

"She didn’t have the money to make the purchases of the chemicals that were needed so she was taking what was needed in the bottle," Officer David Shelby told Fox 23's Abbie Alford. "When I saw her, she had just finished mixing sulfuric acid with starter fluid in a bottle," he added.

"When firefighters were on the scene, she made statements to them that is what she was doing, she was attempting to obtain these chemicals and was in the process of trying to manufacture meth. However, she said she was not very good at it," he added.

As she was being escorted to the police cruiser, Alford caught up with Halfmoon and asked her if she was trying to cook meth.

"I wasn't trying to make meth," Halfmoon insisted.

But at least one officer probably disagrees. He was taken to a local hospital to be treated for burns after the chemicals ate through his gloves.

Just two days earlier, Halfmoon had been released after being arrested in a "smurf sting." Smurf is a term often used for a person recruited to purchase the pseudoephedrine necessary meth production.

"She's been arrested before for the manufacture of methamphetamine," Shelby told KJRH.

Earlier this year, police said another man, Glenn Reese, was busted in the same Walmart with a mobile meth lab in his backpack.

There have been 1,700 meth lab busts in Tulsa from January 2002 through 2011. Between 2002 and 2005, about 3.7 percent of young adults in Oklahoma self-reported using meth, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Watch this video from Fox 23, broadcast Dec. 8, 2011.