Odessa guard accused of smuggling

A guard working at the Ector County Correctional Center became the latest person accused in Texas of smuggling cell phones for jail inmates, an assistant U.S. attorney said.

John Klassen, a prosecutor with the Western District of Texas in Midland, said Odessan Andrew Allen Zehr, 23, was given a federal charge of bribery. He's accused of taking $150 to smuggle the cell phone and was also accused of smuggling two or three "baggies" of marijuana at $100 a pop since late October. Zehr was apprehended by DEA agents Tuesday afternoon and was in the process of being booked into the Midland County Jail at press time.

Klassen withheld the name of the prisoner that he said offered the bribes pending a further investigation, but said he was a federal inmate, and therefore the bribery charge Zehr had was also federal.

Zehr is an employee of Civigenics, otherwise known as Community Education Centers, a New Jersey-based company that is contracted by the county to manage the federal holding facility inside the Ector County Courthouse. A call to Civigenics was not immediately returned Tuesday.

This arrest came as state prison officials were looking into several cell phone smuggling cases throughout Texas.

Prison guards intercepted letters as early as 2004 from mothers telling their incarcerated children they were putting minutes on their cell phones. In October, a death row inmate used a smuggled cell phone to threaten a state senator, leading to a crackdown in all 112 of the state prisons that led to the seizure of 144 contraband cell phones. Since that incident, state prison officials asked for $66 million to purchase high-tech equipment specifically to stop the smuggling within the 112 state prisons.

Information from the New York Times archives and the Austin American-Statesman were used in this report.