Another Greyhound Drug Bust In Amarillo. No Bag Checks?
It's not a big secret that Amarillo seems to have a bit of a drug problem. We hear of a lot of arrests being made due to drugs. Some of them small busts, some of them big ones.
There's one bust that seems to happen more often than it should though, and I can't figure out why.
The Greyhound busts seem to happen more in Amarillo than anywhere else I've heard of. What is the Greyhound bust? It goes like this.
DEA is tracking movement from a certain area or person. They hire a "mule" to travel from location A to location B with a bag or two of drugs. Method of transportation? Greyhound bus.
Now I've never traveled across the country or state lines on a bus, so I don't know how security works at the bus station. Do they not have security that checks these bags before they go on?
Well, we had another bust here in Amarillo last week, and it was on a Greyhound bus that stopped here in Bomb City. David Jose Topete was arrested for having a bag full of 4 kilos of cocaine.
An Amarillo police K9 alerted officers about a bag on the bus that was headed to Los Angeles. Police then removed the bag from the overhead compartment and checked it. Inside they found four packages with the substance.
They returned the bag to the overhead compartment and alerted DEA. That was when two undercover DEA agents got on the bus and started to identify who the bag belonged to.
One of the agents removed the bag from the overhead compartment and that was when Topete immediately stood up. He confronted the agent with the bag, then confessed to it being his. He said he wasn't even sure if it was cocaine or fentanyl that was in the bag, alluding to the fact that he was just the "mule" in all of this.
Topete was arrested on federal drug charges as well as a warrant based out of Alabama.