In full uniform and in full view of investigators, Bexar County sheriff’s deputy Armando Trevino pulled into a gas station on his way to work and purchased heroin from a street dealer.
Trevino was planning on smuggling the dope into the Bexar County jail where he worked as a corrections officer and sell the heroin to inmates, which investigators said he had done for years.
But Trevino ended up becoming an inmate himself at a neighboring jail on charges of bribery and possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
Trevino was the seventh Bexar County sheriff’s deputy arrested so far this year and the 31th to be arrested since 2018.
The situation is so dire that Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar hired a psychologist in January in an attempt to curb the problem in the hopes she can screen the deputies for potential problems before they are hired.
Besides Trevino, here are the deputies that have been arrested this year.
- Markese Djuan Shands turned himself in on Friday on an arrest warrant for official oppression after a ten-month investigation of a March 15, 2018 incident in which he “pushed the inmate hard and knocked him down.”
- Mishal Mathew was arrested on May 14 on a felony charge of tampering with a government record after an inmate died on his watch in which he claimed he had checked all the cells but that proved to be a lie.
- Arnold Juarez Gomez was arrested on May 5 on a misdemeanor DWI charge.
- Andrew McDermott was arrested April 23 for aggravated robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for cutting his ex-girlfriend’s arms over text communications he found on her phone in June 2018.
- Ryan Storm Ferrell was arrested on March 15 for DWI and was quickly fired.
- Rachelle Balmez was arrested January 1 for choking her domestic partner. She had been on paid leave since September 2017 for a separate domestic violence incident.
Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar has taken a very aggressive approach in firing the troubled deputies, calling press conferences after each arrest and trying to ensure the public that he is trying to reign in the problem.
“I will make it a point to hunt you down and cut you down like a cancer,” Salazar said during a press conference on March 30 where he announced the firing of several deputies.
Read about the Bexar County sheriff’s deputies who were arrested last year here.
