A Texas woman was sentenced to six years in prison for selling her seven-year-old son to pay off a drug debt.
Esmeralda Garza, 29, pleaded guilty to three counts of selling or purchasing a child, money laundering, and conspiring to sell or purchase a child.
“The boy was seven years old, which is kind of mind-boggling,” Matt Manning, first assistant district attorney with the Nueces County District Attorney’s Office, tells PEOPLE. “A seven-year-old is self-aware to know what is going on. That is a part of what is so appalling. It’s a pretty crazy thing.”
Garza told police that she chose to sell the boy to pay off a drug debt.
“Ms. Garza was in hawk to this couple,” says Manning. “She owed $1,300 for money for drugs.”
Manning says the couple was going to clear her debt and then “pay her $500 cash and then pay her $700 when the guardian papers came through. The total amount of the sale was $2,500.”
“They were probably going to formulate bogus papers to indicate he had been adopted,” he adds.
The Texas Department of Public Safety Police learned about the sale of the boy last June when they did a drug bust on a home in Corpus Christi.
“They are doing the drug bust and there is a seven-year-old child there and the couple said this is their adopted child,” says Manning. “DPS had done their homework and this child was nowhere in this couple’s file. They were able to ascertain this was not their kid.”
The boy had been at the house for only a few days.
Manning says authorities learned the couple “had been trying to conceive for some time even to the extent they were basically propositioning pregnant women that they found and were trying to adopt their children.”
“This was not a human trafficking case,” he adds.
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Authorities also discovered that Garza attempted to sell her two daughters, ages two and three, but the couple declined because the price she was asking was too high.
Manning says he was perplexed by the case. “There was a receipt given to the lady when she sold the child,” he says. “I don’t know how you give somebody a receipt like that.”
Garza’s defense attorney declined to comment for this story.
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