On July 9, 2011, David Rex Wilterding and his son Justin arrived in Dana Point Harbor on a 23-foot boat from Mexico and won unwanted attention by acting suspiciously.
Two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the area noticed the men loitering near a boat ramp, confronted them and searched the boat.
]
They found 495 pounds of packaged marijuana, according to federal court records.
The
ICE agents also confronted Armando Naranjo-Larios at the Chevy pickup
truck with a trailer that was there to retrieve the boat.
That search produced $5,900 in cash and four cell phones, according to federal court records.
The three arrested individuals eventually pleaded guilty.
This
week, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter sentenced Naranjo-Larios–a
40-year-old father of four kids and a resident of Ensenada, Mexico–to a
prison term of 37 months plus four years of supervised probation after
he's released from custody.
Laguna Niguel's Justin Warren
Wilterding, 34, is scheduled to be sentenced on July 9. His 57-year-old
dad, a resident of San Ysidro, learns his fate seven days earlier.
Without explanation, prosecutors dismissed charges against a fourth man arrested at the harbor, Octavio Ruiz-Toledo.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.