A patch is shown on the uniform of a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent near the international border between Mexico and the United States south of San Diego, California, March 26, 2013. Picture taken March 26, 2013. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

The gunman whose murder of a Border Patrol agent nearly a decade ago exposed the federal government’s controversial “Fast and Furious” operation was sentenced Wednesday to life imprisonment.

U.S. District Judge David Bury sentenced Mexican national Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes to a mandatory life sentence for the December, 2010 shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.


Terry’s killing publicly uncovered the botched “Fast and Furious” operation, in which U.S. federal authorities allowed criminals to buy firearms in hopes of tracking them to criminal organizations. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives eventually lost track of most of the weapons, however, including two found at the scene of Terry’s murder.

The Obama administration was heavily criticized for the mismanaged operation. Terry’s family later sued managers and investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for their roles in the “Fast and Furious” operation, as well as a prosecutor and the owner of the gun shop who sold the two guns at the scene of Terry’s death.

On December 14, 2010, Terry’s four-man team attempted to arrest a group of men near the Arizona-Mexico border whom they suspected of robbing marijuana dealers. When the group refused to stop, the agents fired bean bags at them, prompting the group to fire back with AK-47-type assault rifles. Terry was fatally shot in the back during the shoot out.


Osorio-Arellanes, one of seven defendants in the case, was extradited from Mexico in 2018 and charged with first-degree murder, among other charges. Five of the men are currently in prison, and one was arrested in 2017.


Osorio-Arellanes claimed that his “rights are being violated” and he has not received a fair trial, but the judge rejected his arguments.

“I think you know what the law is of the United States but you refuse to accept it,” the judge said. “In the United States if you take the life of a human being while committing another felony, that’s murder in our country by statute.”

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