Opinion ID: 6328976
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Grand Marquis

Text: Detective Cooper testiﬁed that a March 22, 2017, pole-camera video showed a commercial car carrier depositing a white Mercury Grand Marquis in an alley. Esquivel-Sotelo and Oscar Garnica-Manriquez were there to receive the vehicle. Esquivel-Sotelo was seen using a phone, and at the same time a call between him and Gomez was intercepted. EsquivelSotelo asked Gomez how much money he needed to pay the driver of the car carrier, and Gomez told him how to proceed. Gomez also instructed Esquivel-Sotelo to “put that away” and “send me the picture.” Almost two months later, a call between Gomez and Esquivel-Sotelo was intercepted. In that call, Esquivel-Sotelo conﬁrmed that he was “at the glass place” getting “glass” and 8 Nos. 20-2673 & 21-1158 had arranged for the Marquis to be picked up. Shortly thereafter, Gomez called Garnica-Manriquez and told him to “pick up the money and head over to my house and start wrapping, dude.” DEA Special Agent Kellen Williams then observed Garnica-Manriquez remove a windshield from the back of a Hummer and carry it into the garage. Based on information Detective Cooper provided to Deputy Dave Frye of the Seward County Sheriﬀ’s Department, the Grand Marquis was seized in Nebraska on May 13, 2017. Deputy Frye testiﬁed that he removed the windshield because he knew that the Grand Marquis had a void space that can be accessed that way. He found three packages and a GPS tracker. Two of the packages contained cash—$99,920 in total—and the third contained about a kilogram of cocaine. On May 15, 2017, Gomez called Tomas to tell him that the Grand Marquis had been stopped, and then he called Peñasco, who asked him how many “hamburgers” were in the vehicle. Gomez responded that there were three—“two (2) of them were paper (money) and … the bad one.”