Tonight, three Texans are locked up pending expulsion within the next month after they were caught in Belize illegally.
But how did they get here?
Well, the story sounds more like a Bonnie and Clyde buddy movie. The Texans - three adults and a baby - stole a catamaran and took it on a Caribbean cruise, only to be caught in Ambergris Caye.
Courtney Menzies has the details of this international boat heist that ended on San Pedro. Here's that story.
These shoppers may look like any other tourists but in fact they are allegedly international boat thieves, child abductors and local shoplifters.
The 1.5 million US dollar catamaran, Tifosi, was stolen from Fort Lauderdale, Florida last month, and the trail led the boat thieves from there to The Bahamas, then to Grenada, then Isla Mujeres in Mexico, and finally to Ambergris Caye in Belize. And it was a local cop that brought their international escapade to an abrupt end.
She was responding to an island community chat that they had been shoplifting. She detained David Blake Pendergrass, Karim Osman, and Elexa Taylor Chism.
But a cop's intuition told her there might have been more to the story. That's when she started looking into this boat that the thieves renamed Aries.
She found out that the catamaran was actually Tifosi, stolen from Fort Lauderdale. She contacted the US embassy and put into motion a chain of investigation which led to the detention of these three suspects. The baby was then taken into protective custody because it turns out, just like the boat, he was stolen from his mother by his father, seen here pushing the stroller in the blue shirt.
And the real kicker of the story is not only did he allegedly kidnap the baby and steal the catamaran, reports say he was also stuffing the child's stroller with shoplifted items - like this bottle of Tanqueray gin.
Today, the three adults were in court for immigration offenses, to which they pled guilty. They were all fined $1,000, and ordered to be removed from the country by November 24th. Reports say the baby is being held at a protective custody home on San Pedro - as the Embassy makes arrangements to reunite him with his mother.
According to International media, a delivery crew will reportedly be dispatched to take Tifosi back to Fort Lauderdale.
