A 29-year-old Peñitas man pleaded guilty last week for his role in a head-on smuggling crash in 2019 that killed two San Juan residents and sent six people who were in the country illegally to the hospital.
Humberto Garcia pleaded guilty last Thursday to engaging in organized criminal activity, to two counts of evading arrest or detention causing death and to six counts of evading arrest causing serious bodily injury, court records show.
In exchange for the guilty pleas, prosecutors dismissed two murder counts and six counts of smuggling of persons causing serious bodily injury or death.
Garcia was charged along with 22-year-old Peñitas resident Jesus Eduardo Estrada and 38-year-old Mission resident Alejandra Gonzalez Lopez for the March 13, 2019, crash on U.S. Highway 83 near La Joya that killed 45-year-old Leonel Martinez Jr. and 69-year-old Aurora Chavez.
Estrada, who has remained in the Hidalgo County Adult Detention Center, has pleaded not guilty and was scheduled on Monday for a court hearing. Gonzalez, who allegedly rented the vehicle used in the deadly crash, has remained a fugitive since April 2021 when she failed to show up for her arraignment.
Estrada is accused of driving the vehicle.
On Thursday, Garcia received 10 years for each count he pleaded guilty to. Those sentences will run concurrently rather than consecutively and he received credit for the nearly four years he’s spent in the county jail waiting for the resolution of his case.
A Texas Department of Transportation crash report obtained by The Monitor in 2019 said that the driver of a green 2004 Ford Expedition, which had “unrestrained occupants,” was traveling eastbound at a high rate of speed while fleeing authorities when the driver steered onto a grass median to pass other vehicles and lost control, veering into the westbound lanes and hitting a white 2007 Nissan Sentra.
Martinez was driving the Nissan and Chavez was his passenger.
As of press time, online court records had not been updated to reflect anything of note in Estrada’s Monday morning court hearing.
