Page 40 - Florida Sentinel 2-26-21

Crime
Woman Gets 22 Years On Federal Drug Charges
13-Year-Old Charged With Making Gun Threat
A 13-year-old student was arrested Monday and charged with making written threats to conduct a mass shooting. The incident pertained to Pinellas Park Middle School.
According to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, deputies received an anony- mous tip on Sunday, February 21st, that the student had threatened to shoot up her school, in a Snapchat post. It was also re- posted on Tik Tok.
In the written threat the student allegedly said, “I can’t be the only one who want to shoot up my school, not going to do it, just a thought.” The post then stated, “Are you ok, no it’s Monday tomorrow.”
When the teenager realized that people were screenshot- ting the post, she removed it. After removing the post, the suspect reportedly followed with another post that said, “For all you that reposted, it was a joke and I did not mean it.”
During the investigation, deputies met with the suspect and her parents and she ad- mitted to it. She said it was a joke.
She was arrested and trans- ported to the Pinellas County Juvenile Assessment Center.
Deputies said she did not have access to any firearms and she did not appear to have the means to carry out the threat.
UNCLE SANDY
Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, 6, 18, 31, 43, 59, rather than as you think it should be, 2, 26, 39, 44, 61.
Last week, a federal judge sentenced a woman to more than 20 years in federal prison. She was charged with several crimes including conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and heroine, and attempted possession with the intent to distribute methamphetamine and heroin.
U. S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday sen- tenced Yolanda Herrera, 43, of Rex, GA, to 22 years in federal prison. She pleaded guilty to the charges on June 4, 2020.
According to court docu- ments, between October 24, 2018, and March 18, 2019, Herrera organized and coor- dinated the shipment of nu- merous containers of methamphetamine and heroin aboard the cargo ship Leticia, which repeatedly traveled from Altamira, Mexico, to the Port of Tampa.
On or about March 11, 2019, U. S. Customs and Bor- der Protection (CBP) agents at the Port of Tampa inspected a container onboard the Leticia that, according to the ship’s manifest, contained stone blocks, typically used for the building of stone fountains. Agents from Homeland Secu- rity Investigations (“HSI”) im- aged the blocks and observed that several of them contained anomalies.
After breaching the blocks, the agents uncovered 14 large packages that had been shrink-
YOLANDA HERRERA
wrapped with black carbon paper, which contained more than 50 kilograms of metham- phetamine and 3 kilograms of heroin.
On March 15, 2019, HSI agents observed the blocks being loaded into a yellow rental truck. They then fol- lowed the truck as it exited the Port of Tampa and continued to Atlanta, Georgia.
On March 16, 2019, at ap- proximately 10:00 a.m., agents arrested two Mexican nation- als, Nestor Vazquez- Morales and Adan Martinez-Onofre, as they attempted to offload the truck outside a residential home.
Agents searched Vazquez- Morales’s home in Georgia and seized approximately two kilograms of heroin, three firearms (including a rifle), $12,725 in U. S. currency, and one stone block that was iden- tical to the blocks discovered in the Port of Tampa.
Cellphones obtained from
the individuals showed that Herrera, who flew from Tampa to Atlanta after the shipment arrived in Tampa, was actively planning and co- ordinating the pickup of the narcotics from the port to their eventual destination.
Between October 2018 and March 2019, Herrera rented six other trucks. During that time, Herrera’s co-conspira- tors completed seven ship- ments on the Leticia, all of which departed from Mexico, arrived in Tampa, and were identified as stone fountains in the cargo manifest. GPS data obtained from the rental trucks show that the trucks were all rented in Tampa, and dropped off in Atlanta, with stops at the same Atlanta resi- dence.
On September 18, 2019, Herrera was arrested in At- lanta. During an interview with law enforcement, she admitted that she had been hired and paid to coordinate, supervise, and organize the transporta- tion of narcotics sent from Mexico to Tampa, and deliver them to Georgia. Federal agents searched Herrera’s home and found a stone block in her backyard.
In July 2020, Nestor Vazquez-Morales and Adan Martinez-Onofre were sentenced to federal prison terms of 15 years and 8 months and 5 years and 10 months, respectively, for their roles in this case.
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