A 22-year-old American employee of Cape Air experienced a nightmare that took him from the end of a relaxing vacation to the confines of a Canadian prison.
Yeremy Cuevas Tolentino was wrongfully arrested at Toronto Pearson International Airport when his shampoo bottles tested positive for cocaine – a false positive – while traveling Sao Paulo to Toronto to Boston.
As an airline employee he frequently listed for numerous flights and cancelled, and that’s what got him flagged by U.S. officials in Toronto who handed him over to Canadian officials. He flew via Canada because that’s where he could find seats available. And he spent a week in jail for something he didn’t do.
The 22 year old was traveling back from vacation in April. As he prepared to connect from Toronto to Boston he was flagged by U.S. customs at immigration preclearance. He assumed it was because he had fruit snacks with him, but it was the result of listing for several different flights out of Brazil. that flagged him as a drug trafficker, because flying anywhere to anywhere flags you as a drug trafficker. U.S. officials handed him over to the Canadians.
Canadian officials tested his three shampoo bottles for drugs. The test came back positive and he was arrested and transferred to Maplehurst Correctional Complex, a medium and maximum-security facility. Three days into his stay the shampoo bottles were sent out for a lab test, and two days later it came back negative. Yet he wasn’t released right away.
It wouldn’t be surprising for any given passenger to test positive for drugs in a swipe test, for instance if your Uber or cab driver was transporting something illegal in the trunk before handling your luggage?
This was a failure of U.S. authorities – suspecting someone as a drug courier over behaving like an airline employee. It was a failure of Canadian authorities, arresting someone based on a fallible test and locking them up for a week while slow-walking a real test. And it was a failure of the passenger, who didn’t secure legal representation (though as a 22 year old kid on an airline income that’s not surprising).
(HT: Loyalty Lobby)
Canada is a disgusting dictatorship, Truedeu is a monster, and the US is starting to look the same with it’s corrupt DOJ and supreme cabbage head leader.
Anyone has the contact info of the gentleman, please PM me as I can get him a well known & good lawyer at YYZ to get his justice.
Thanks.
I was hoping things would change with the current government where any visitor who had any arrest for almost anything no matter how many years ago may be denied entry. Even wrote them about this and got a non-answer. But between that mindset and the hopeless “wars” on nouns (drugs and terror, thereby lucratively treating symptoms, not causes) another victim was claimed. In time the U.S. policies will collapse under their own unsupportable economic weight, or just burn out like the papal crusades did, but meanwhile a lot of harm is being done.
You hear about innocent people being jailed all the time. A week was too much. A minute is too much if you didn’t do anything wrong. Thank God it wasn’t as bad as some cases I’ve heard about. 9 months in jail, accused of a murder they didn’t do. Years in prison for something you didn’t do. Some are compensated with money. That’s only partial compensation. They can’t give you that time back.
Hertz says, “Hold my beer….”
Hey Gary. You really need to moderate the comments here.
What did I say? 🙂
I am with @Samuel.
@B wood – I do, but it’s just me so if I go into a meeting or take a call it isn’t real-time
Hey Samuel,
I’ve heard him called many names but I never heard Trump called a supreme cabbage head leader.
Since I grew up near the border with Canada, I have been to Canada a lot. It was easy to enter and the border agents were friendly. The Canada of today is unrecognizable. It would be best for Americans to avoid any flights to it or through it.
The Canadians are apparently learning a lot from us. Unfortunate this is.
@Christian And by us I guess you mean the United States. The Canadians didn’t have to learn anything from us. They can be unfair all on their own. This and all innocent people being denied their freedom is very unfortunate.
I flew from Jakarta via Amsterdam to Leeds. When I arrived in Leeds I waited for my luggage. When I had retrieved it, I proceeded to the exit. There were two men in suits (NOT in uniform!) who stopped me and asked if I wanted to follow them for a check of my luggage. A sniffer dog “had smelled something”.
My heart rate increased dramatically. Not because I was a smuggler, but because I realized that I had just traveled through 2 (!) “suspicious” countries, and it occurred to me that someone could have put something in my luggage.
I had the gentlemen search my suitcase, expecting them to hold up a bag of something at any moment, to which of course I would say “I have no idea what that is, I didn’t put that in my luggage” to which of course they would reply “they all say that”.
Fortunately nothing was found. I asked the gentlemen how it was possible that the sniffer dog had smelled something, and they told me that the noses of those dogs are very sensitive, and that it was possible that a baggage handler in Jakarta or Amsterdam had smoked or used something, after which the residue ended up on my suitcase as an olfactory trail.
I was VERY relieved…
@Carol Lewis – We here in the USA have more practice at this sort of thing. I like our northern neighbors just fine but they just don’t do false imprisonment as well as us.
@Christian It may be that we don’t hear about it as much in Canada. I know of one instance in Canada where a man was falsely accused of murdering his wife when she actually fell down the stairs by accident. He spent years locked up. One case is too much. The other unfair things I mentioned that happen in Canada are: shopping while black and as a black Canadian described it himself: racism with a smile. I don’t who they learned it from but it needs to be unlearned and stopped-everywhere. Our ancestors came to the U.S. from other places so I feel we brought our ideas with us from those places.
@CLT Flyer – sniffer dogs are a godsend for law enforcement. They provide enough justification for a search, even though there’s absolutely no way to know what made the dog bark (bag smells of food, or the handler pulled the leash, or any number of other reasons). And they make up lame excuses to cover up poor success rates that would undermine their claims of “reasonable suspicion”.