An Arizona mom arrested in Mexico and accused of smuggling 12 pounds of marijuana was framed, her family and a state official say.
Yanira Maldonado was arrested on a bus last Wednesday while traveling home with her husband from a funeral, CNN reports. At a military checkpoint in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, authorities told Maldonado that they found 12 pounds of marijuana under her seat.
Her daughter, Anna Soto, told CNN that her mother is innocent.
"She's an honest good woman. A Christian woman that would never do anything to jeopardize her freedom," Soto said. A Mexican state official agreed, telling reporters that it's impossible for one woman to be lugging around that much marijuana.
Maldonado's lawyers told her husband Gary that he could bribe a judge to get her out of jail, but the $5,000 he cobbled together was either too late or not enough. Maldonado was transfered to a women's jail in Nogales, according to ABC News.
Gary Maldonado told Fox 10 that witnesses who saw them board didn't see them with any packages, and that security footage of them proves it.
"The most frightening feeling you could ever imagine and scary, what's going to happen next?" he said. "I've seen two other buses roll in with the exact same thing and they took the bus driver in and arrested him."
A judge will decide Tuesday whether Maldonado should be released. If she's not, she could wait in jail another four to six months for another hearing.
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