A man who had been deported from the United States four times before his 2015 arrest on trafficking charges was sentenced Friday, officials said.
When state troopers stopped Marcos Benitez Camacho in Duluth on April 17, 2015, he was in possession of drugs with a street value of more than $1.5 million, the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
The now 37-year-old swore on his mother’s grave during trial that he didn’t know anything about the 96 pounds of methamphetamine hidden in the car he was driving.
A Ford Fusion Camacho drove had a hidden compartment and he insisted from the moment he was arrested that he had no idea about the drugs.
“At one point in his testimony, the defendant folded his hands as if he was praying and swore on his mother’s grave that he did not know about the drugs contained in the vehicle,” the news release said.
Camacho said he was hired as a day laborer to drive the car to a mechanic shop, when he was stopped on I-85 northbound at Pleasant Hill Road.
A spokesman for the district attorney’s office said Camacho sneaked back across the U.S. border four times using fake names.
The prosecution argued Camacho was a member of a drug trafficking organization and had been hired to drive the vehicle in order to transport the methamphetamine to an undetermined location in Gwinnett County.
Camacho was convicted of trafficking meth and sentenced to serve 27 years in prison and pay a $1 million fine.
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