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Dominican amputee admits trying to smuggle cocaine inside her wheelchair's batteries

By adamg on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 7:28pm

A Dominican woman pleaded guilty today to a drug-smuggling charge in federal court - admitting she used the batteries of her motorized wheelchair to try to smuggle nearly five kilograms of cocaine through Logan Airport.

Ireline Aponte Melende, 30, arrived at Logan on a JetBlue flight from the Dominican Republic on May 15 with a dead wheelchair. She told customs officers her wheelchair's batteries had died, but a suspicious customs officer had the wheelchair and its two batteries X-rayed - which revealed "an abnormality" in both, according to an affidavit by a Homeland Security agent filed in US District Court in Boston:

Each battery was opened revealing two (2) bricks contained in each battery (four (4) bricks total). The bricks contained a white powdery substance. One brick was field tested using NarcoPouch 904B, and it tested positive for cocaine.

She's scheduled for sentencing on March 2, 2016 and faces up to 20 years in federal prison.

Topics: 
Crime
Free tagging: 
Logan Airport


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Comments

By anon on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 8:53pm.

Maybe Trump is right all along!

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By adamg on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 9:05pm.

She came on a tourist visa. Maybe Trump was a fascist blowhard all along!

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By anon on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 9:18pm.

Trump is as extreme blow hard. But I bet you wouldn't say the same thing about Bernie sanders.

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By adamg on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 9:26pm.

Because Sanders is not an extremist blowhard.

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By anon on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 10:01pm.

I think "Deport Everyone" is as crazy as "Everything will be free".

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By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 12:21am.

It sure as hell wasn't Bernie Sanders.

Nice propagandistic blather you got there.

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By aging cynic on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 12:57am.

said his platform would double the deficit, which has already doubled in the last 7 years. Always nice to hear progressives accuse OTHERS of propaganda and talking points. Yikes.

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By Jeff F on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 2:07am.

Actually, the deficit, which is by definition a yearly measure, has been shrinking quite significantly for years and is now about 40% of what it was seven years ago.
There's plenty of articles out there to this effect:

"The federal deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was the smallest in eight years. Spending was up over last year, but tax revenue rose more.

The 2015 deficit came in at $439 billion, or 2.5% of the size of the economy, according to numbers released Thursday by the Treasury Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

That's the lowest since 2007, when the annual deficit was $161 billion, or 1.1% of GDP.

It's also $44 billion, or 9%, lower than it was in 2014.

CNNMoney (New York) October 15, 2015: 5:48 PM ET

I suspect you are probably talking about the National debt, which has increased, and will continue to do so regardless of what administrative policies are implemented in the next few years - that's compound interest biting us in the ass. (All those aging over-entitled boomers won't help the situation either.)

Although I'm fairly skeptical about Bernie's rhetoric myself, it's not clear to me from a bit of googling who these 'independent' analysts are, so a link or two would be helpful.

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By Nbr4 on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 12:21am.

Remember this every time you get outraged after watxhing a news channel show "shocking coverage" of TSA agents "heartlessly" screening grandma, or a quadrapolegic in a wheelchair, or a sleepy toddler at an airport.

Grandma could -unfortunately- be a drug dealer or a terrorist. And even if she's really an innocent sweetheart, her grand-daughter could have slipped a few bricks of meth, or explosives, into grandmas walker, or carry-on bag.

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By Ron Newman on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 6:28am.

What would have been the harm, really, if she had managed to bring her stash in?

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By Patricia Roberts on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 7:39am.

You obviously don't live in a neighborhood where drug buying and selling are common. Usually it's accompanied by a lot of other crime, violence and neighborhood disruption. It isn't just a case of a willing seller and willing buyer--there is a whole violent culture that accompanies it.

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By Ryan M on Thu, 10/29/2015 - 2:03pm.

A culture that exists because the product is illegal. It's a direct result of prohibition.

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By kernelPanic on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 8:41am.

TSA is unable to detect it's way out of a paper bag via the useless security theatre techniques they employ. Have you ever seen a TSA agent do anything more than wave a hand wand over a wheelchair? What are the odds that in this case they'd "randomly" decide to open a battery compartment?

It will eventually come out (as was the case with most BOS airport seizures) that the TSA was directly tipped off on where and who to search by one of the unacknowledged DEA intelligence units that specializes in no-warrant, pervasive surveillance. Because the methods would not survive judicial scrutiny the unit members have been trained to create plausible but fake evidence trails and hide their own involvement by having other law enforcement agencies be the public face of the arrest or seizure. These are the same law enforcement people that will drop all criminal charges instantly if there is even the smallest risk that their use of a stingray box would be revealed in open court.

I would maybe give the benefit of the doubt for a Trooper that "randomly" found something in luggage via a canine sweep but, c'mon -- the TSA? Really? Nobody is gonna believe that.

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By KSquared on Wed, 10/28/2015 - 8:50am.

This was CBP. They are a little more intense.

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