Who is Casey Garcia? Texas mom poses as daughter, 13, for day at school to show security flaws
SAN ELIZARIO, TEXAS: El Paso County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested a San Elizario woman on Friday, June 4, after she was accused by the local school district of trespassing on school grounds posing as a student. The woman reportedly spent an entire day at Garcia-Enriquez Middle School posing as her 13-year-old daughter and documenting her experience online as administrators and most teachers failed to notice.
The woman was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and tampering with government records after the San Elizario Independent School district notified the Sheriff’s Office about the incident on June 1. Deputies were also alerted to several videos taken by the woman documenting the incident. One of the videos is titled, “Going to school as my 13yr old daughter (Middle School edition).”
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Who is Casey Garcia?
The 30-year-old from San Elizario, Texas, alleged in the aforementioned video that she was not busted by a teacher at her daughter's middle school until the seventh lesson of the day -- the last teacher asked her to stay after class and confronted her. Garcia's experiment was caused by her fear of gun violence at her daughter's school. In the past few months, gun violence has seen several cases. Be that of six-year-old Aiden Leos who was shot dead. Or nine-year-old Trinity Ottoson-Smith, who was shot dead while she was jumping on a trampoline. Another two-year-old Florida girl was accidentally shot by her three-year-old brother with a loaded gun that a family friend had hidden on a couch.
As per her YouTube records, Garcia created this account on May 19 and has only uploaded five videos to date. The first two deal with mukbang and the Banana Sprite Challenge -- eating a banana and drinking Sprite without vomiting. The third video is the one mentioned above. The fourth is a follow-up titled, “Why I posed as my 13 year old daughter. A raw but real answer.” And the fifth is her confrontation with law enforcement authorities when deputies from the Sheriff’s Office located Garcia at her residence and took her into custody. This video is titled, “Full video of the police coming to my house”.
In the six-minute-long school clip, Garcia can be seen dressing up as her daughter in a hoodie, glasses, and face mask before allegedly sitting down in lessons and the lunch hall. In the video, Garcia said that she put on fake tanner and dyed her hair to better resemble her teen daughter.
In the video, Garcia said that she spoke to a faculty member and then attended all of her daughter’s classes. In the follow-up video, she said, "We need better security at our schools. This is what I tried to prove. I didn’t do this to get views. I didn’t do this to get likes. I didn’t do this so people could be mad at me and I can never walk around El Paso again."
"The teachers were so preoccupied about the students who were online that they weren’t paying attention to the students who were there physically," Garcia said in the video. "I think the deal-breaker for me was actually walking in and posing as a seventh-grader. I mean, I’m no spring chicken, but it wasn’t hard."
"There have been one too many mass shootings in schools," she said in a video following her arrest. "That is disgusting to think of that it all could have been prevented just by putting metal detectors and more security… Are you more concerned that I, a parent, was sitting next to your child, or do we really want to wait for the next person taking their Second Amendment right to the extreme?”
Garcia was initially booked into the El Paso County Detention Facility on the aforementioned two charges, and for an unrelated traffic warrant. Her bonds totaled $7,908. Following the incident, San Elizario Independent School District Superintendent Dr Jeannie Mesa-Chavez said in a statement: "While there was a breach in security by an individual associated as a parent with the school, we want to assure you that our security measures are being reviewed and evaluated."