A Texas woman has been arrested after posting video of herself posing as her 13-year-old daughter and sneaking into the child’s school. She said she did it to highlight security gaps amid mass shootings. Casey Garcia, 30, was booked into the El Paso County Jail on Friday, records show.
A YouTube account in her name carries a video in which Garcia–wearing glasses, a yellow Marvel hoodie, and face mask–described herself entering her daughter’s school.
“Do I look like a seventh grader?” she said. “No? Cool. Awesome.”
Garcia stands 4’11” and weighs 105 pounds, according to online jail records viewed by Law&Crime.
Video showed her saying hello to an adult. Superimposed text described him as the principal.
“Oh my goodness, I am going to get so caught,” she said. “I am actually really scared now.”
Footage showed her receiving directions. Eventually, she showed up to class and sat down. Later, she said she was in gym class. The coach asked her who she was, she said. She gave her daughter’s name, she said. He believed her.
Later, she can be seen maskless, eating at lunch.
It is toward the end of the video in which she described herself getting caught and sent to the principal’s office.
In a follow up video, she said she did this to highlight security gaps amid mass shootings.
“I bet you anything someone else can do this,” she said. “This is why I did this.”
She said she was only caught after seven periods when a teacher confronted her after class. She told her she snuck in as a “social experiment.”
In the second video, Garcia complained about the lack of attention teachers gave to in-class students compared to remote learners. They did not engage with her except to tell her to put her phone away, she said.
“I was, ‘Hey, put your phone away,'” she said. “I was not a name. I was not a person. I was, ‘Hey, put your phone away.'”
A third video showed authorities arriving at her home before her arrest, telling her they were there on an outstanding traffic warrant.
Garcia was booked into jail on a count of criminal trespass, tampering with government records, and the 2017 aforementioned traffic issue, records show.
“From my perspective, it’s very heavy handed to go in and charge her with a felony,” her attorney Theresa Caballero told Law&Crime in a phone interview.
Otherwise, she did not answer questions on whether she believed her client committed a crime. Caballero focused instead on Garcia’s stated reason for going into the school: to reveal security gaps in the system. What is important, the attorney said, is that anyone could come in and sit down for the entire day. She claimed the principal was trying to “lure” Garcia to the school on Thursday and Friday, and had wanted her to take down the video right away. (Garcia was arrested Friday.) Caballero argued that this was a “brouhaha over nothing” to distract from what she described as the school’s lack of security.
“I guess this is what happens when you embarrass a school administration,” Caballero said. “But we’ll see what an El Paso jury has to say.”
Update – 12:09 p.m.: We added comment from Caballero.
[Screengrab via Casey Garcia]
