After he was arrested on Palm Coast Parkway on Tuesday amid a swarm of deputies, Glocks and rifles drawn, Asdrubal Rios Rodriguez acted as if he had no idea why he was in handcuffs.
“Houston Police Department told us to pull you over,” a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy tells him.
“Houston police?” Rodriguez asks, chewing gum, as if bemused. “Why? Why happened?” he asked. The deputy tells him he doesn’t yet know. When the deputy asks a colleagues whether they’ve looked in the car, Rodriguez says: “Nothing. In the car, nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. Deputies conducting a weapons sweep of the vehicle found $79,000 cash and several pieces of gold jewelry. Houston police had issued a “be on the look-out” for the car Rodriguez was driving, a black Chevrolet Tahoe with Maryland license plates that triggered a hit on the sheriff’s license plate readers. Houston police in its advisory said the occupants of the Tahoe were wanted for an armed robbery of a jewelry store there, where they had pistol-whipped a victim.
The Houston advisory had referred to two Black suspects getting away with $1 million worth off jewelry. Rodriguez isn’t Black, he’s Hispanic, originally from Cuba. He had no driver’s license and said he’d never had once since coming to the United States.
Deputies, with assistance from the Real Time Crime Center, had located the Tahoe at 3 Kings Way in Palm Coast. It was unoccupied. The tag, which was partially covered, was a match with Houston’s advisory. Deputies then saw Rodriguez and another man walk to the car and load it with groceries. (The other man was later released from the scene.)
Rodriguez, 35, drove the Tahoe out of the parking lot. A deputy observed the Tahoe blow through a Stop sign, and noted the obstructed tag, triggering the traffic stop after the Tahoe turned from Old Kings Road onto Palm Coast Parkway westbound. An arrest report notes that deputies followed the car until they could safely execute the high-risk traffic stop, past Boulder Rock Drive. When they did so, the two men immediately complied.
While speaking with detectives, and after being read his Miranda rights, Rodriguez “made admissions of the jewelry store heist he committed in Houston,” his arrest report states, and “provided detectives with all information regarding the heist.” The arrest report notes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was contacted. It issued a detainer for Rodriguez, but not for the other man, thus enabling the Sheriff’s Office to detain Rodriguez at the county jail even though the only charge he faces locally is a second degree misdemeanor of driving without a license–essentially, a traffic infraction–with a $500 bond. (Today, the status was changed to no bond.)
It’s unclear how Rodriguez entered the United States. Cubans are granted automatic asylum the moment they set foot on American soil, if they escape Cuba by boat. It’s a different process for those crossing the southern border. Cubans are among nationals from four countries (Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti are the others) eligible for entry and work permits (“parole” permits) for up to 30,000 such migrants per month. Cubans may travel to Nicaragua without a visa–the only Central or Latin American country where they may do so, making it a preferred Cuban point of entry for the trek north. Rodriguez told authorities he as been in the United States for four years, working as a home improvement construction worker, according to his arrest report.
