‘I don’t belong here,’ insists woman jailed in drug bust
A package from an acquaintance in her native Colombia sparks fight for freedom
CALGARY Standing naked in a room bustling with women, Sindy Rodriguez began to cry.
She covered her face with her hands, aware it was definitely not the time for tears.
Being asked to strip down was degrading enough.
Now, a uniformed woman was demanding Rodriguez squat, spread her cheeks and cough.
“Do you have drugs in there?” the guard yelled. “Is this your first time in here?”
The tears continued. Rodriguez, 20, couldn’t help the outburst. She had never been to prison before, never had any issues with the police and had no criminal record.
She was supposed to be hanging out with her friends, dancing and making plans for her future.
Instead, Rodriguez had been charged in connection with the largest volume of cocaine ever seized in Fort McMurray.
“I don’t belong here,” Rodriguez thought.
“This isn’t me.”
Sindy Rodriguez was born on March 10, 1989, in the port city of Cartagena, Colombia.
She moved to Canada to live with her mom when she was 10, settling into school in Penticton, B.C., where she learned English. Rodriguez returned to Colombia when she was 14 to visit her father for a scheduled one-month trip that turned into a nearly twoyear stay in the South American country as her parents fought over her custody.
At the tiny private school she attended in Bogota, Rodriguez was a social teenager who was close friends with a girl named Monica. Monica was dating a boy named William Murillo, known by most as “Smiles,” a nickname that originated from his charismatic grin and friendly personality. Both Monica and Smiles became a distant memory after Rodriguez returned to Canada in 2005.
High school and graduation followed and by 2009 Rodriguez was living in Fort McMurray with her older sister while working as a corporate sales rep for a wireless communications provider and taking ballroom dance classes. When Murillo, the smiley boy who dated her friend years ago in Colombia, contacted Rodriguez in June 2009, she didn’t think twice about his desire to reconnect. He soon became another contact in a long list of people she chatted with on her well-used BlackBerry.
Over a series of messages in Spanish, Murillo said his sister was moving to Canada for school and he wanted to send some of her belongings by mail. The only other person the siblings knew in Canada was a family member who worked as a physician and was never home, Murillo said.
Willing to help an old acquaintance, Rodriguez passed along the address where she lived in Fort McMurray without asking where in Canada the physician or Murillo’s sister lived. Rodriguez was extremely close with her own sister, who was seven years her senior, and she didn’t think to mention anything to her about Murillo or the forthcoming delivery to their Timberlea home.
Weeks and then months went by without anything arriving in the mail from Murillo. In a Nov. 12 Facebook message, Murillo said he didn’t have enough money to send his sister’s belongings but believed the items were now on their way. Murillo asked Rodriguez to contact him when the package arrived, so he could send “people” to fetch it. Over the next two weeks, he sent messages thanking Rodriguez and asking if the package had come.
It finally arrived, shortly before 7 p.m. on Nov. 25, 2009, delivered by a tall, good-looking man, dressed in a crisp Canada Post uniform. Rodriguez flirted with the cute deliveryman during their brief interaction and giggled when her sister urged her in Spanish to ask for his phone number as he stood in the doorway, oblivious.
The two sisters had no idea they were being watched as the door closed and Rodriguez carried the heavy parcel from the front of the house to the kitchen. Overwrought with curiosity and encouraged by her sister, Rodriguez decided to ever so carefully open the box with a kitchen knife. She figured she’d sneak a peek at what Murillo had sent his sister, and then perfectly rewrap and tape up the brown paper, without anyone knowing except her sister and young niece, who was also in the room.
Confusion spread across Rodriguez’s face as she opened the package. She immediately noticed white powder on a black garbage bag that lined the parcel. Inside the bag were several small plastic bags full of more white stuff. Rodriguez opened one of the bags, dipped her finger in the white substance, smelled it, licked it and concluded it was flour.
“Why would he send you flour?” Rodriguez’s sister said. “That’s so weird.”
“Maybe his sister bakes or something,” replied Rodriguez, knowing it was impossible to find a popular type of Colombian flour in Canada. BANG. BANG. BANG. After a few heavy knocks on the unlocked door, more than a dozen police officers stormed into the home where the sisters were talking and Rodriguez’s seven-yearold niece was dancing and playing with the package’s wrapping.
The sisters were immediately arrested and placed in separate police cars. Rodriguez swore a friend from Colombia sent the parcel for his sister and she told police about the Facebook messages with Murillo.
Rodriguez was numb as the police cruiser took her to the Fort McMurray police station. She sat in the back of the vehicle shocked and trying to process what had just happened.
Rodriguez was charged with importing 12 kilograms of cocaine, possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of marijuana (after a small quantity of the drug was found in a pocket of a jacket that belonged to her).
RCMP Sgt. Mark Anderson would later tell the Fort McMurray Today newspaper it was the largest cocaine seizure in the town’s history.
The Canada Border Services Agency had intercepted a parcel addressed to Rodriguez at her sister’s Fort McMurray home, which had arrived in Toronto by plane from Panama on Nov. 20, 2009. Wrapped in brown paper, the cardboard box contained what appeared to be six decorative candles. Inside those candles, officials found 12.167 kilograms of cocaine, worth more than $500,000.
RCMP replaced most of the
drugs with flour. An anti-theft detection powder and an intrusion alarm were installed in the package before it was wrapped and delivered to Rodriguez by a Mountie dressed as a postal worker.
Her sister was released after staying overnight, but Rodriguez remained in a Fort McMurray holding cell. She insisted to anyone who would listen that she had only agreed to accept personal belongings, not cocaine.
No one believed her.
“All I could think about was I was going to be in this little room forever,” Rodriguez says.
Andres Talero was outraged, angry and mad as hell after staying up late into the evening, poring over court documents. Now, he couldn’t sleep.
Talero had moved to Calgary from Colombia just a few weeks earlier, to become consul general with jurisdiction over Alberta and Saskatchewan. As part of the new role, he spent the afternoon in Edmonton visiting a desperate young prisoner serving a 9½-year sentence for importing 12 kilograms of cocaine from Panama to Fort McMurray.
Talero was well-versed in the legal system. He had a law degree and had met hundreds of inmates while working as consul general of Colombia in Miami in the 1990s. There, he found that in 99.9 per cent of cases, the person behind bars was guilty as charged.
But something felt different about this case. Rodriguez insisted she was innocent the moment she was arrested and had maintained the same story to this day, nearly four years later.
Talero spent more than an hour at the prison talking with the Colombian-born woman convicted of importing cocaine hidden in candles. He left the meeting with a pile of documents and a mountain of questions.
“There’s something that doesn’t add up here,” Talero said to his assistant on the three-hour drive from Edmonton to his home in Calgary.
“If she’s lying to us, she’s the best liar I’ve ever seen.”
There’s something that doesn’t add up here. If she’s lying to us, she’s the best liar I’ve ever seen.