For most of the summer, the ordeal of Andrew Tahmooressi, a former Marine sergeant arrested by Mexican authorities in March for bringing three guns across the border, has been a right-wing cause c?l?bre. Tahmooressi has been sitting in a Mexican jail since March, and claims he accidentally crossed into Mexico after making a wrong turn. However, Slate’s John Avignone recently peered into the guts of Tahmooressi’s story, and found that a lot of his account doesn’t add up.
Tahmooressi, a native of Weston, Florida–a suburb of Fort Lauderdale–was in San Diego to recover from PTSD after two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent most of March 31 across the border in Tijuana before coming back to San Diego. He has maintained that later that night, he was driving along Interstate 5 from La Jolla to meet up with some friends in San Ysidro on the other side of San Diego. Somehow, he says, he missed the last exit before the border and accidentally crossed back into Mexico. When Mexican border agents searched Tahmooressi’s car, they found an AR-15 rifle, a vintage Colt .45 pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun, clips and ammunition. Since it is illegal to bring any weapons into Mexico, Tahmooressi was arrested on the spot. If convicted, he could face as much as 14 years in prison.
Avignone is very familiar with the San Ysidro crossing, and has gone over it numerous times over the past four decades. In his view, Tahmooressi could not possibly have missed the last American exit before reaching the border. I-5 is very well lit, and has numerous signs with equally numerous chances to turn around and head back north. Even if he’d missed those, there are several turnaround lanes just yards from the border. Additionally, the San Ysidro crossing is very large and brightly lit, unlike many crossing points along the border–no surprise, since according to Avignone it’s “the busiest land border crossing in the world.” But we know for sure that Tahmooresssi wasn’t driving on I-5. He recently admitted that earlier in the day, he parked his truck in a lot close to the border and walked to Tijuana. According to Avignone, with this admission Tahmooressi conceded that he was already “as far south as you can be” along that stretch of the border and still be on American soil.
In the last week, evidence has turned up that confirms Tahmooressi wasn’t as unfamiliar with the San Ysidro crossing as he claims. Numerous phone and ATM records show he crossed into Tijuana as many as six times in the weeks before his arrest. Tahmooressi has since admitted having a fling with a woman who works in Tijuana’s red-light district. And just before his arrest, he rented a room at a Tijuana hotel; he was nervous about spending the night in Tijuana and came back to San Diego.
This new evidence has changed the entire nature of the story. Tahmooressi’s mother, Jill, who had spent most of the summer making the rounds of right-wing media drumming up support for her son, has returned to South Florida and hasn’t been heard from in awhile. A pro-Tahmooressi media event was abruptly called off last week. To Avignone’s mind, given that there is no way Tahmooressi could have possibly crossed the border by accident, one has to wonder what he was thinking when he came across the border “with a small arsenal” in the first place.
You’ve probably been bombarded with a lot of emails and Facebook posts urging you to ask Obama to do something to get Tahmooressi home. But before you respond to them, at least have the facts on hand.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
