A police officer from El Paso will spend two years in prison for her role in helping her stepfather run a cocaine distribution operation out of his house.
This week, 24-year-old Monica Lisette Garcia, an El Paso police officer at the time of the criminal offense, went before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Guadarrama and received a 24-month prison sentence on a drug conspiracy charge. Garcia previously pleaded guilty to one of four drug trafficking charges on August 9, 2021, as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, Garcia used her position with the El Paso Police Department to help her stepfather Fred Saenz avoid detection by law enforcement while he ran a cocaine distribution operation. Saenz would sell drugs out of his house and would have a separate location to stash drug shipments. Garcia would carry out counter-surveillance and run license plates of vehicles in an attempt to find undercover officers that would get near the operation.
The matter began in August 2020, when El Paso police and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents got information about a street-level drug distribution operation that sold high-quality cocaine called “scama.” Authorities carried out multiple undercover buys and set up a surveillance operation on Saenz’s house. In November 2020, authorities arrested Saenz and one month later they arrested Garcia. Saenz pleaded guilty to one count of drug conspiracy out of a total of four drug charges that had been filed against him. He received a sentence of three and a half years in prison.
Court documents do not mention the source of Saenz’s cocaine or if the case is tied to a Mexican drug cartel.
Luisana Moreno is a contributing writer for Breitbart Texas.