California man to stand trial on I-44 pot bust charges
Jan. 19—A California man waived a preliminary hearing Thursday on charges related to the Missouri State Highway Patrol's seizure of 20.5 pounds of marijuana he was carrying in the trunk of his vehicle on Interstate 44.
Silvestre Avila Villanueva, 31, of Paso Robles, California, waived the hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court on felony counts of both possession and delivery of a controlled substance and first-degree child endangerment.
Associate Judge Joe Hensley ordered the defendant to stand trial and set his initial appearance in a trial division for Feb. 26.
A state trooper stopped a vehicle Avila Villanueva was driving Oct. 7 on I-44 in Jasper County for following another vehicle too closely. The nervousness of the defendant and the inability of a passenger in the back seat to provide any proof of his identity led the trooper to ask the defendant to open the car's trunk, according to a probable-cause affidavit.
Avila Villanueva purportedly complied with the request, and the trooper's suspicions were raised when he located bags there that felt like they might contain packaged controlled substances, according to the affidavit. Opening one of the bags, he discovered several vacuum-sealed bags of marijuana, and he found a large trash bag containing several more bags of pot.
The total weight of the seizure was reported to be 20.5 pounds. The child endangerment charge was added based on the defendant's alleged admission that the marijuana was his and that his juvenile passenger knew nothing about the marijuana.
