Arrest of woman found with cocaine stuffed in lamp linked to carjacking. She’s released

Despite saying there was sufficient evidence of “a substantial, long-running criminal enterprise” that she, her boyfriend and sister were involved in, a federal judge in Orlando Thursday released the woman who picked up a lamp containing $60,000 in cocaine and is connected to the carjacking and murder of a Homestead woman.

Magistrate Judge Robert Norway agreed with Monicsabel Romero Soto’s attorney that the 28-year-old woman wasn’t a flight risk as she had no previous arrests and had two young children living with her in the Casselberry home she shared with her boyfriend and sister.

Attorney Susan Malove told the judge that Romero Soto “is very concerned about her children” ages 3 months and 10.

READ MORE: Bricks of cocaine found in lamp offer clue into a Homestead woman’s deadly carjacking

The Florida Department of Children and Families removed the children from the home after the arrest of Romero Soto and her live-in boyfriend, Giovany Crespo Hernandez, a person of interest in the Homestead woman’s case. He turned himself to Seminole County law enforcement Monday night; he’s wanted on fentanyl trafficking and marijuana possession with intent to sell charges.

Guns, drugs and scales found in home

Homeland Security Investigations agents told the judge of a thriving drug enterprise at the home, which federal agents raided on April 17, the date of Romero Soto’s arrest. They found more than $17,000 of rubber-banded cash, multiple semi-automatic handguns and scattered drugs, including 17 grams of fentanyl inside a kitchen cabinet.

They also found drug-packaging materials and two drug and money ledgers, federal prosecutor Stephanie McNeff told the judge. Drugs were freely strewn about the home in easy reach of the children, she added.

In the home’s garage, a plastic table was “set up like a drug table,” McNeff said, with drugs, cellophane wrap, a money counter and scales for weighing.

In his ruling, Norway called it a “barrage” of paraphernalia within the home, showing probable cause that Romero Soto, who moved to Central Florida from Puerto Rico in 2018, knew cocaine would be sold.

Homeland Security agents had learned of a parcel en route from Puerto Rico to St. Cloud in Osceola County, just south of Orlando’s Orange County, that might contain drugs. They intercepted the package and found more than three 1-kilogram cocaine blocks, worth about $60,000, hidden within multiple parts of a large cellophane-wrapped lamp, Pablo Rivera, a federal law enforcer and case manager, testified Thursday.

He said the three rectangular compartments of the lamp were “perfectly shaped” like cocaine blocks.

Glue in lamp was clue

One clue to what was hidden inside? The glue in the lamp had not yet dried, Rivera said, signaling to law enforcement that the lamp had been hastily constructed and sent via two-day air UPS to hide the drugs.

Investigators put the package back together and delivered it, setting up a stakeout near the St. Cloud home to see who would pick it up.

Romero Soto, the driver of a white SUV, surveilled the area for about an hour, Rivera said, before parking in the St. Cloud home’s driveway. Carrying her 3-month-old child, she put the package, addressed to her sister, Rubi Romero Soto, in her car.

READ MORE: Man admits he was paid to kidnap Homestead woman in Central Florida, FBI says

Once boxed in by authorities, Romero Soto said she was picking up a lamp she’d purchased for about $300 off Facebook Marketplace and sent it to a friend’s home because she didn’t think she could receive mail at her address in Casselberry, according to Rivera. She said the homeowner saw the package was delivered by home surveillance camera and told her to come and get it, Rivera said.

McNeff argued Romero Soto was a danger to the community, and her children were in danger in the home. “There are no [release] conditions that can assure the safety of the community” from Romero Soto, she said.

Red jumpsuit, ankles chained

Romero Soto sat calmly in a red jumpsuit, her ankles chained, listening to the proceedings through an interpreter quietly reciting everything to her in Spanish.

There was no direct connection made between Romero Soto’s drug trafficking case and the April 11 carjacking and murder of Katherine Altagracia Guerrero De Aguasvivas. The 31-year-old Homestead mother of two was carjacked at gunpoint in her white Dodge Durango while she was stopped at a red light near Winter Springs, a bedroom community in Seminole County. It was about 6 p.m.

Romero Soto and Crespo Hernandez are among the five people arrested and linked to the investigation into Guerrero De Aguasvivas’ murder.

Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma said Tuesday he believes Guerrero De Aguasvivas made the trip from Homestead to Central Florida to meet with Crespo Hernandez at the Casselberry home.

Her body was found later that evening in her torched Durango, shot to death. The car was found in a construction site in Osceola County, to the south of Orlando.

In a spreadsheet referenced in court but not admitted into evidence, Rivera said packages delivered to the St. Cloud address under Romero Soto, her sister and other names from Puerto Rico date back to 2021. Some of those packages were seized and contained cocaine, Rivera said, who did not specify how much cocaine was found.

Boyfriend is known drug dealer: Feds

Malove, the defense attorney, argued the evidence was circumstantial. She said it only proved that Romero Soto’s boyfriend, Crespo Hernandez, whom prosecutors described as a known narcotics dealer involved in multiple homicide and home invasion cases, and her sister, who has not been arrested, were involved with selling drugs, not Romero Soto.

Romero Soto has no previous arrests or criminal history which factored into his decision to release her, Norway said. Her children, he noted, constitute a tie to the local community.

Romero Soto will wear a GPS ankle monitor and live with a friend in Kissimmee who was appointed as a third-party custodian. She may not have any guns or ammunition, must surrender her passport by Monday at 4 p.m., will undergo a mental health assessment and may not contact her boyfriend or her sister under court order.