Ankle monitor gaps prompt push for change

Good evening, everyone. Fox 26 was first to report on another high-profile defendant pitching his GPS tracking device and then heading to the border. Randy Wallace joining us now to tell us what's being done to stop this. Yeah, Anthony. Now, Freddy Arriaga was free on a $100,000 bond following his arrest in April of last year for sexual assault. His bond conditions include wearing a GPS ankle monitor. According to prosecutors, Arriaga grabbed a young woman by the hair and dragged her into the woods. The victim's mom and brother heard her scream and held Arriaga until police arrived. On October 6th, Arriaga showed up in court, but he failed to appear on October 16th, the day his trial was supposed to begin. Earlier this year, capital murder defendant Lee Gilley took his ankle monitor off and fled to Italy. There's over 4,000 defendants currently being monitored by Harris County Pretrial Services that have an ankle monitor slash GPS device for them. How many of those are for violent offenses? Who knows? They won't say. How many of them are wanted, again, nobody knows. All right, so these GPS ankle monitors that people have, they're supposed to be wearing, is someone monitoring this system 24-7 in case they try to cut it off or something? No, Anthony, they are not. Now, in some cases, it can take pretrial services several days to report monitor violations to the court. But Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia is working to change that. I wanted to make sure that we do not have another case like the one where the individual was able to tamper with the device and end up in Italy. So I want to make sure that we are tracking violent offenders in particular, but all people who have been given these devices. We have several of them out there, and I want to make sure that we use the technology to its fullest extent by monitoring it effectively 24-7. And now we'll be able to coordinate that with the Harris County Sheriff's Office and the District Attorney's Office. All right, so the sexual assault suspect we were talking about before, Arriaga, could he be back in custody here? Yeah, we're hearing that he may have been apprehended at the border. He'd been on the run, Anthony, for about a week. All right, Randy, thank you so much. Sure.