Seven years for armed Honduran fentanyl dealers whose unpaid bridge tolls led police to their door
Two Honduran drug dealers, who came to authorities’ attention when they didn’t pay bridge tolls due as they commuted from Oakland to San Francisco to peddle their wares, were each sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment today after being caught with guns, fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Mario Sevilla Artiaga and Danexi Mendoza Licona earlier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and possession with intent to distribute fentanyl respectively, after Oakland police raided the apartment they shared and found more than three quarters of a kilo of drugs and four guns.
“The sheer amount of drugs and fireams in the case, combined with their criminal histories, make this a very serious crime and shows that both of these young men are comfortable selling drugs,” said U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar this morning at Oakland federal courthouse.
“There is no dispute in the record that that is what they have been doing to make a living for some time,” he added.
As Oakland police knocked on the pair’s front door on August 20 2025, a police drone filmed Sevilla throwing a Glock 9mm pistol and more than half a kilo of fentanyl and meth out of the kitchen window.
In Sevilla’s bedroom officers found more fentanyl and meth along with a scale, $6,637 in cash and two walkie-talkies, while Mendoza’s room yielded fentanyl, meth, black-tar heroin and three more guns stashed in his closet. Mendoza admitted he knew the weapons were there but claimed they were not his, and when asked about the drugs told officers he had done “bad things.”
In the living room police found receipts for money transfers to Honduras, and a Mercedes parked outside held more fentanyl and more than two pounds of powder used to cut the drug and stretch it further for sale.
Prosecutors said the fentanyl seized amounted to 357,850 potentially lethal doses.
After his arrest Sevilla told officers he had entered the U.S. illegally and run up a debt to a drug cartel, which ordered him to sell fentanyl to pay it off. Once the debt was cleared, he said, he carried on dealing for profit.
The raid came about after police were alerted that a car linked to the pair was racking up unpaid Bay Bridge tolls. When officers tried to pull the car over it sped off, endangering other drivers, and police traced it to the International Blvd apartment and obtained a warrant to search both the car and the home.
Both men had long records of drug arrests. Each had been held seven times on drug charges, most of them for dealing in the Tenderloin. Sevilla already had a 2019 felony conviction in San Francisco for being an accessory after the fact, but the city’s courts gave him comparatively light sentences.
Arrested in San Francisco in December 2022 for possessing cocaine for sale, in breach of a stay-away order from an earlier case, he was released without bail on a GPS ankle monitor. Eight months later he was arrested again in the city and charged with dealing fentanyl, crack and meth, but that case was dropped when he pleaded guilty to the cocaine charge in January 2024 and was freed on probation, having already served six months.
Two months later, while on that probation, he was caught in San Francisco handing drugs to a buyer outside a tent where police found a backpack holding 896 grams of fentanyl, more than was seized in the Oakland raid. A San Francisco Superior Court judge gave him the lightest term available, two years in county jail, with credit for almost 10 months already served and eligibility to serve only half the term, and the remaining charges were dropped.
Mendoza was arrested four times in two weeks in July 2023, the year San Francisco’s overdose deaths hit a record 810. In February 2024, while on pretrial release in two drug cases and wearing a GPS ankle monitor, he was tracked visiting a Tenderloin drug-dealing hot spot nearly 33 times in six days, and was arrested again with drugs, baggies and cash.
His only previous conviction was for possessing a loaded .380 handgun, found when police stopped him for reckless driving. Two days after the Oakland raid he led the California Highway Patrol on a chase at more than 100 mph, and was arrested with cash and two phones after a large amount of fentanyl was allegedly thrown out.
Prosecutors had pushed for longer terms, seeking nine years for Sevilla and eight and a half years for Mendoza, while the U.S. Probation Office recommended seven years and three months for both.
“They drove back and forth from Oakland to San Francisco – to the Tenderloin where, Your Honor is well aware, addiction plagues many residents,” assistant U.S. attorney Kelly Volkar told the court today.
“They both have been arrested a half dozen times mostly in and around the Tenderloin in San Francisco for selling drugs over the last several years,” she said. “There is a strong need for deterrence in this case.”
The court heard that Sevilla arrived in the U.S. aged 14 and, soon after reaching Oakland, was robbed at gunpoint and shot four times. Mendoza grew up without a father in Honduras and followed him to the U.S. against his mother’s wishes. He has two young children, born in 2022 and 2024, and told probation officers he began selling drugs to support his family.
Both men are in the country illegally and were told they face deportation once they have served their sentences.
Please support our work by making a donation
To be notified of new stories follow us on X
