The Dallas Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration announced in a press release on Tuesday that two drug traffickers pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder a DEA agent.
Manuel Gomez-Garcia, 35, and Jorge Humberto Velazco Larios, 29, admitted to trying to orchestrate the assassination of a DEA task force officer assigned to their then-pending drug case in 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice has not publicly identified that officer.
“Through our drug investigation and the tenacious efforts from our colleagues at FBI Dallas to hold these individuals accountable, we are pleased that their admission of guilt means they will now pay for their crimes,” said Eduardo A. Chávez, special agent in charge of DEA’s Dallas Field Division.
The two men were in federal custody in 2020, pending resolution on drug charges related to the possession and intent to distribute methamphetamine.
According to court documents, Gomez spoke with an “outside contact” on a jailhouse phone and expressed his wish to have the agent on his case killed.
He later called his girlfriend, Alicia Yuritzi Juarez Martinez, 31, and his sister in Mexico, Eva Denisse Gomez-Garcia, 38, and discussed arrangements to pay someone for the hit. He told them that his co-defendant, Larios, would help with the payment.
For his part, Larios used a jailhouse phone to call an “unindicted co-conspirator” and asked him to bring money to a workshop.
In mid-June, the unindicted co-conspirator made two “down payments” to someone for the planned murder, totaling $5,000.
Gomez later made more phone calls to his “outside contact,” instructing the person to contact his girlfriend and sister, who he said could assist with identifying the DEA agent.
The Justice Department charged both women with conspiracy to use interstate commerce in the commission of murder-for-hire, but the two remain fugitives, believed to be in Mexico.
Gomez and Larios face possible life sentences for the plot.
“These defendants plotted to murder an officer who routinely risks his own safety to rid our streets of dangerous drugs,” said U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham. “The Justice Department will not tolerate retaliatory violence against its own. We are prepared to move mountains to protect the men and women who protect us.”
