…I just like saying “county-funded fajitas”:
[Gilberto] Escamilla was fired in August and arrested after authorities checked vendor invoices and obtained a search warrant that uncovered county-funded fajitas in his refrigerator.
Mr. Escamilla worked at the juvenile detention center in Cameron County, Texas. This is way down in the south part of the state (Brownsville is the county seat.)
Mr. Escamilla was allegedly ordering fajitas through the detention center, using county money, and then delivering them to his own customers.
His scam was uncovered when he missed work for a medical appointment and an 800-pound (360-kilogram) fajita delivery arrived at the center, which doesn’t serve fajitas.
The state claims this scam amounted to $1.2 million worth of fajitas over nine years. Mr. Escamilla was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Friday.
Edited to add: more from Texas Monthly.
Theft of more than $300,000 is automatically a first-degree felony in Texas. On top of that, Texas treats theft by a public servant differently from other kinds of theft. The theory behind that is that theft committed by a private individual harms the person or people who were stolen from; but theft by a public servant harms the taxpayers who pay their salary, and harms society at large by eroding trust in those who’ve agreed to serve us. In cases where a public employee is accused of stealing less than $300,000, charges involving public servants using their official positions to facilitate the crime are automatically escalated to the next-highest level of felony. In Escamilla’s case, the value of the meat he stole meant that it was already the highest class of felony—which helps explain why his sentence was so high.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2018 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Beef, Food, Law, Politics, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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