(May 9, 2008)—A Fort Hood soldier remains in jail in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, after he says he mistakenly drove across the Mexican border with firearms in his car.
Spc. Richard Torres was carrying a small arsenal in his car including an AR-15 assault rifle, a .45-caliber handgun, 171 rounds of ammunition, several cartridges and three knives.
He didn't try to hide the weapons when he reached a Mexican border checkpoint, but he insisted he hadn't meant to cross the border with the guns, which in Mexico are restricted for use only by the military.
Instead, he says he was looking for parking in El Paso when he inadvertently drove onto a bridge leading to Mexico and couldn't turn around.
Juarez is a border city where drug cartels pay top dollar for exactly the kind of high-powered weapons Torres had in his car.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that Torres wasn't smuggling weapons into Mexico to sell them, but the Iraq war veteran continues to wait for a Mexican judge to decide whether to accept his account.
Mexican prosecutors have said only that the arrest reflects the government's commitment to battling "every type of delinquency and organized crime."
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