Cult fortune teller, carjackers get prison time after attack on Border Patrol agent in Mission

June 14, 2011 6:48 PM
Jared Taylor
The Monitor

McALLEN — A cult fortune teller left federal court Tuesday with the lightest prison sentence among a quartet of defendants who learned their fates.

But Claudia Cecilia Gomez Aguilar told U.S. District Judge Randy Crane she already paid the highest price of anyone involved with the June 2009 botched carjacking of an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent in Mission.

Gomez, 29, worked as a fortune teller who blessed a drug cartel courier planning to drive about $400,000 from Georgia to the Rio Grande Valley.

The fortune teller snitched on her client. But instead of leading seven others to the courier, they mistakenly targeted the off-duty agent, who was returning to the Valley with his young daughter to visit her grandmother.

The case came to a head last month after jurors convicted Jose Antonio Armendariz, the carjacking ringleader, following a weeklong trial in U.S. District Court.

Gomez — an illegal immigrant — admitted her role soon after her arrest and cooperated with prosecutors. But as she remained in federal custody awaiting her sentence, an accident caused Gomez to lose the child she’d been carrying in the womb.

“I believe I have paid a very high price for what I did,â€