On Friday, a federal judge in Maryland sentenced a Honduran man to 12 years in prison for attempting to hire someone to help him in a murder by selling them discounted cocaine.
Frelin Hernandez-Guardado, 30, was sentenced on the attempted murder for hire charge as well as a count of possessing cocaine with the intent to distribute it and possessing a gun as an illegal alien, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland said in a release.
Hernandez-Guardado acquired the illegal guns some time before October 2021, when he sold the guns in two separate instances to law enforcement sources.
In December 2021, after regional law enforcement busted a drug trafficking operation, Hernandez-Guardado told two confidential law enforcement sources that he wanted to kill someone that he believed cooperated with law enforcement leading up to the crackdown on the drug ring, federal prosecutors said.
On Jan. 12, 2022, Hernandez-Guardado and one of the sources left his residence in Virginia with 900 grams of cocaine in tow, meant to be sold to another law enforcement source for help in the planned murder. The authorities found, stopped and arrested Hernandez-Guardado in Maryland before the crime could be carried out, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Federal prosecutors did not say where the defendant was living in Virginia, where the planned victim was living or where in Maryland Hernandez-Guardado was apprehended.
The defendant’s attorney, Richard Bittner, said that Hernandez-Guardado has been in custody since then, according to the Baltimore Sun.
The Honduran national had previously been deported from the U.S. on two occasions prior to his arrest, federal prosecutors said, and Mr. Bittner told the Baltimore Sun that Hernandez-Guardado will once again be deported back to Honduras following the end of his sentence.
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