After being chased by police at around 3am on Tuesday 9 August, a car slammed into the front of a house in south London and burst into flames, killing a 25-year-old nursery worker.
The woman, named as Acacia Smith, and her partner, Craig Kearney, 25, who survived but was seriously injured, are suspected of having attempted to fly a drone into Wandsworth prison. There have been no arrests and the investigation is ongoing.
A few days later, on Saturday 13 August, police officers from the Met's anti-drone initiative, Operation Airborne, noticed someone acting suspiciously near HMP Pentonville prison in Islington, north London. The suspect ran from the scene, dropping two bags containing class B drugs and mobile phones in the process.
The next day, officers intercepted a low-flying drone near the prison that was carrying drugs, psychoactive substances, and mobile phones as its illegal cargo. Earlier they found another drone that had crash-landed after flying over the prison. No arrests have been made.
This is the frontline of the war on a new police and security battleground: how to stop drones delivering things to prisons.
Drugs have been known to have been thrown over prison walls hidden inside all manner of items, including tennis balls and dead pigeons, but remote-controlled drones – available for a few hundred pounds – offer a whole new opportunity to those looking to serve the lucrative prison drugs market.
The trend is accelerating so quickly that BuzzFeed News understands the Ministry of Justice is currently trialling anti-drone technology from a private firm at at least one prison in the north of England, with a view to starting a pilot scheme if successful.
The government would not confirm nor deny this but said it was continuing to "explore ways to tackle the threat posed by drones being used to bring contraband into prisons".
The Pentonville incident is the latest in a string of drone incidents at UK prisons. In July police said a drone was intercepted near Bedford prison carrying screwdrivers, a knife, drugs, and phones. Multiple drones carrying drugs have been intercepted or found at Strangeways prison in Manchester.
The BBC published footage in May of a drone delivering a package to Wandsworth prison in south London.
In July a 37-year-old man from south London was jailed for 14 months for flying tobacco and spice, a synthetic form of cannabis, into prisons in Kent and Hertfordshire. It was the first prosecution of its kind.
Both the Ministry of Justice and the National Council of Chief Police Officers refused to answer BuzzFeed News' questions about how many drones have been intercepted in this year so far.
But a freedom of information request in February found that in 2015 police and the prisons service either intercepted or found 33 drones on or near prison property, many of which were carrying drugs, phones, and SIM cards.
Richard Gill founded Drone Defence in early 2016 to offer companies and government agencies ways to stop drones.
"I speak to the prisons service quite a lot and the stuff that surfaces in the press is the tip of iceberg," Gill, until recently a logistics officer in the army who served in Afghanistan, told BuzzFeed News. "There's probably 10 times as many incidents that we just don't know about.
"The drone operators have very little chance of being caught. They could be up to a mile away and they can fly the drone to the cell window. What Amazon are trying to doing with Amazon Prime Air [a drone delivery service], criminals are doing that right now."
Gill's original plan was to help civilian companies use drones for things like mapping, but due to demand from his clients, he began focusing on security and defence and finding ways to stop drones.
So how can the authorities stop them?
One of the first ways is to ask whoever is flying a drone towards a prison to stop and warn them of the consequences if they don't.
Dedrone, a San Francisco startup that raised $10 million in May, makes a device that sounds an alarm when a drone is near. Its technology can monitor a large building or a wide surface area using sound and motion sensors.
Then, once the drone has been identified, a jammer is triggered that effectively cuts the signal between the controller and the drone, rendering it useless.
Drone Defence, based on Doncaster, has a portable device that can be used to manually disable drones up to 1,000 metres away.
Gill said Drone Defence's gadgets can also make a drone go into its failsafe mode and fly back to its controller, allowing security staff to follow it.
And if all that fails, there is also the trusty net gun, which is fired at drones to take them down from close range.
UK startup SkyWall makes huge net guns with computer-aided targeting that look like something out of Aliens.
Another, rather more low-tech solution to the problem of drones is to train birds of prey to take them down.
This service, provided by Dutch company Guard From Above, is used in the Netherlands and is reportedly being considered by the Met.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence said: "Safety in prisons is fundamental to the proper functioning of our justice system and a vital part of our reform plans.
"We have introduced new legislation which means that anyone found using drones to smuggle contraband into a prison can be given a sentence of up to two years.
"We take a zero tolerance approach to illicit material in prisons and work closely with the police and CPS to ensure those caught are prosecuted and face extra time behind bars."