SAN ANTONIO — Nearly $30 million worth of drugs are seized from a Bexar County home. The head of south central Texas DEA shares new insight on the bust and the scope of the methamphetamine problem nationwide.
Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar says Thursday night, authorities conducted a traffic stop near U.S. Highway 281 and Jones Maltsberger Road. They found 39-year-old Jose Armando Villasana Hernandez with 10 kilos of meth and children in the car.
Law enforcement say the traffic stop led them to a home on the 5400 block of Lake Grove and inside, a methamphetamine conversion lab. The lab is where liquid meth is processed into the crystalized form. In all, they seized 78 kilos of meth, along with 300 pounds of meth liquid in 10 five-gallon buckets that could have produced even more meth.
They also found 4 kilos of heroin, acetone and propane tanks. The sheriff said the set-up could have caused a massive explosion and affected nearby homes.
KENS 5 spoke with 80-year-old Nan Johnson who lives nearby. She said the neighborhood seems quiet but it’s filled with crime. She says she’s been robbed at gunpoint and has witnessed drug activity.
“I hope that whoever else is doing this activity will get caught. I’m going to continue to be careful like I have been and trust God,” said Johnson.
Dante Sorianello, the assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Agency in San Antonio, shared new insight on the recent bust. Sorianello has served in the DEA for nearly 34 years. He covers San Antonio, Austin, Waco and 50 counties in the central part of Texas. He said the methamphetamine was likely manufactured in Mexico and brought to the lab inside the home.
“The reason why it’s in liquid form is because it’s much easier to smuggle in gas tanks, in containers and in things of that nature. A simple comparison would be if you put salt in a glass water. It dissolves but if you were to extract that water, you would have salt again. It’s a bit more sophisticated than that but it’s more or less what was going on at that location,” he explained. “They’re repackaging it for distribution in the United States.”
He said the drugs were likely sold in San Antonio, other major cities in Texas, the midwest and potentially, the east coast.
“The troubling thing we have to look at right now is that while this may be the biggest here in San Antonio, across the border and in Los Angeles, San Diego, everyone is seeing record seizures of methamphetamine. In the last 3 weeks in my intelligence briefings, we’ve seen some of the largest seizures ever in the country,” Sorianello shared.
He applauded the work by border security officers in the record number of seizures. As for the recent drug bust, he called it a big win for local law enforcement but said the work is never over.
“Let’s call them our competitors on the other side of the law. They are very sharp. They work at this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and they are always trying to find new methods. For them, it’s a life and death situation because they live and die by the sale of their product,” Sorianello.
As for the suspect involved in the traffic stop, he is now in federal custody. The sheriff said more arrests could be coming.
