Drug dealer Gerardo Medina Hernandez,
26, of Anaheim, has been sentenced to 14 years in state
prison for stashing more than 90 pounds of black tar heroin in false
compartments of a car in an Anaheim garage last year.
The punishment was handed down Wednesday after Hernandez pleaded guilty to one felony count of possession for sale of a controlled
substance with a sentencing enhancement for possessing heroin exceeding
10 kilograms in weight.
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On April 4, 2009, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement agents, Inglewood police and members of a multi-agency task force surveilling Hernandez watched him pull packages from two compartments built into the
front wheel wells of his 2005 Toureg and put
them into a cooler in his garage in the 1700 block of West Lincoln
Avenue, Anaheim.
According to the Orange County District Attorney's Office:
After leaving the garage, Hernandez went to a nearby Target store. Upon
leaving the store, he was contacted by officers who asked the defendant
what he had been doing. Hernandez responded, “Bad things.” When asked by
the officers what was inside the garage, Hernandez replied, “Negra,” a
Spanish slang term for heroin.
In a subsequent search of the garage, narcotics officers discovered the
heroin, some of which was still in the car. The rest had been removed
from the vehicle and was lying on the floor or had been packed into
coolers.
Hernandez was arrested, and by the time authorities stopped weighing the packs, they realized they had 95 pounds of smack worth an estimated $10 million on the street. State Attorney General Jerry Brown hailed it as the largest seizure in the history of the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, the oldest anti-narcotics agency in the country.
A Mexican native with a green card, Hernandez had been using the apartment to store narcotics and had no
furniture inside except for from some air mattresses and a television.
As we previously noted in It's a Quick Read 27, Orange County Register readers jumped all over Hernandez's immigration status as revealed in the paper's online coverage of the bust.
“'Hernandez, 25, a native of Mexico with a green card . . .'
enough said,” wrote one commenter.
“Still has his gren [sic] card and 3 hots and a cot at our
expence [sic],” added another.
The best observation came from SweetPig:
“Note to self: Close the garage door BEFORE unloading huge quantities of illegal narcotics.”
Word to your dealer.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.