Former Houston police captain arrested after tracking down man he thought masterminded voter fraud

A former police caption is now facing charges for forcing a man off a Texas highway at gunpoint

Dec 15, 2020

If you needed evidence that some police officers are supporters of outlandish conspiracy theories, you now have your proof. As reported by Houston’s ABC 13 News, former Houston police captain Mark Anthony Aguirre, 63, has been arrested in a bizarre incident where he ran a man off the road and then held him at gunpoint because he believed he was the mastermind of a voter fraud effort in Texas.

Aguirre terrorized an innocent air conditioner repairman whose truck contained air conditioner parts instead of the 750, 000 ballots Aguirre was expecting. It all began when Aguirre told police that he’d determined that the unidentified man, referenced only as DL, was behind a massive voter fraud plan in Texas, one of the states President Donald Trump actually won.

According to court documents, he’d asked police to detain DL via a traffic stop, in October, but was told that wouldn’t happen because there was no corroboration for his allegations. The self-described patriot told police he would do it himself and conduct a “citizen’s arrest.” On Tuesday, he made good on that.

People Go To The Polls On First Day Of Early Voting In Texas — People cast their ballots at a polling location on October 13, 2020, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Sergio Flores/Getty Images)

Aguirre said he shadowed DL for four days before backing his SUV into him on a road in Houston. When the man got out, Aguirre forced him to the ground at gunpoint, then held a knee in the man’s back until other suspects searched his truck. When they didn’t find any ballots, they drove it away.

In the police affidavit, Aguirre said that after observing the man he believed to be a conspirator in the voter fraud and that it was a scheme to harvest votes using Hispanic children, who he believed wouldn’t show up on any databases. He also said that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was paying $9.7M to harvest ballots.

The man Aguirre allegedly detained says he believed he was being held up. But after police arrived, DL consented to a search of his residence and a shed on his property in a mobile home community where no ballots or any contraband was found.

As it turns out, Aguirre was the one being paid. A group called the Liberty Center for God and Country made three wire transfers to Aguirre’s account for a total of $266,400, police say. Aguirre identified himself to police as a member of the group.

Instead of finding voter fraud, Aguirre has found a court case and potential jail time of up to 20 years as he’s been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony.

“He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime, and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg told Houston’s ABC 13 News. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start – first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”

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