American Driver Sentenced in UK Crash But Mystery Deepens: Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Interpreter?

Finally, our International Man of Mystery has been sentenced in that year-ago UK car crash to which he's plead guilty at every court appearance he's ever had.  

A typical news article is here:

An American who fled Britain after a car crash that left a mental health nurse seriously injured drove like an “arrogant young boy racer” the night of the collision, a judge told him.

Issac Calderon was sentenced to 32 months in jail after losing control of his Honda Accord following a high-speed overtaking manoeuvre and crashing head-on into a Mercedes being driven by Elizabeth Donowho in July 2023. 

Sentencing Calderon on Thursday, Judge Martin Jackson said: “Seven days before this accident you had bought a car and had not taken the trouble to make sure that it carried insurance.

- snip -

The judge was told Calderon worked for an American company in Peterborough as an interpreter and that he said to police after his arrest that he “played follow the leader” when he was driving.

Calderon’s lawyer told the court that he was not in the UK “as an American army official of any sort” and was driving along the A4103 between Worcester and Hereford to meet a friend he had met through online gaming.

Other UK news accounts added a little more on that lawyer's statement: ‘He was here working as an interpreter for an American company in Peterborough,’ [Patel] told the court. ‘He wasn’t going to see anyone from the SAS or anything of that sort.’

We further learned that "Calderon had been married for a couple of years, Mr Patel said, and was earning money in the UK to send back to his wife and his parents ... It was also said that his injuries meant he had to get a taxi to his workplace, costing £100 per day, before he was ‘let go’ when the firm found out about his involvement in the accident, and then left homeless ... He was then faced with a ‘stark choice’ and took up a contractual entitlement to a flight back to the United States paid for by the unnamed firm."

The Crown Prosecution Service's public statement is brief and dull, but here it is FYI.

This info fills in some of the picture of our Agent Double O Aspergers. Married man, devoted son, car owner, gamer, and employed by an unnamed American company as an interpreter. 

With him being a good Tejano from Humble, Texas, I'll accept that he can speak Spanish. But, well enough to be a certified interpreter? Maybe not.  

I see there are some distribution centers in the region in which the crash occurred. Perhaps he worked on import-export to customers in Spain? 

The mystery continues. 

  

Harry Dunn Sequel Review: Slow Pacing, Terrible PR, Doom Production

He may look dumb but that's just a disguise 

He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage 

Ballad of the Uneasy Rider - Charlie Daniels (1973) 

Well, what do you know? The extradition came off at long last, so our International Man of Mystery may actually appear in a UK court someday. 

Yet, the UK tabloid reaction to this stunning advance of Justice has so far been oddly subdued, it seems to me. No national celebration either, such as attended every bit of the original Harry Dunn production. 

  

The Daily Mirror had as much detail as any, here, and at least one quote I haven't seen elsewhere. 

Both public and press seem fundamentally bored with our Agent Double O Aspergers, despite how the tabloid build-up of this case featured endless repetition of the terms 'intelligence soldier,' secret services, Official Secrets Act, SAS, and much more of an equally lurid appeal.  

Have the West Mercia Police lost all appreciation of the desperado they have taken in? I hope they're keeping him under constant observation in their most Mission Impossible type escape-proof cell, because I shudder to think what capabilities an 'intelligence solider' from the Texas National Guard could bring to bear on a rinky-dink police lock-up. (Check out the original movie in the Rambo franchise if you want details.)  

By the way, how unusual is it for the U.S. to agree to the extradition of a citizen to the UK for criminal prosecution? Not unusual in the least, it turns out. In fact, with the sole exception of the immune diplomat in the Harry Dunn case, the U.S. has approved every single extradition request from the UK. 

You can find this statement in the record of a question period in Parliament from 2020: 

"Since the [current extradition] treaty came into force [in 2007], the United States has never refused to extradite somebody sought by the U.K." 

That sounds definitive. So then, you might wonder, why does the Dunn family's spokesman and brain trust keep saying the opposite? From the Daily Mirror's story:

He said: “We all know America is highly reluctant to extradite nationals and we have had to move heaven and Earth to make that happen. It is a minor miracle to see the defendant back in our jurisdiction.” 

That's easy. Because telling self-aggrandizing lies is what he does. Expect plenty more.

Another quote from the Daily Mirror, this one from a prosecutor in the case, is just as self-aggrandizing if not exactly a lie.    

Prosecutor Kate Leonard said: “We worked closely with the US to ensure our extradition request was expedited.”

Really? Lets look at the timeline of key events. The crash occurred in July, 2023. The American driver skipped a UK court appearance and became a fugitive in December 2023. He was taken into custody in the U.S. on an extradition warrant in July 2024, and a leisurely ten weeks after that, in October 2024, he was picked up by West Mercia Police and returned to the U.K. His next court appearance is scheduled for November 2024. 

She calls that "expedited?" Hey, I work for a government too, but that is some slow-rolled process.

 

Frankly it's getting to be a struggle to maintain my interest in this one. Here's hoping our Texas National Guardsman will break bad and shake things up in that lazy low drive land.

 

Isaac Calderon Extradition Update is Rumor-Only For the Moment

“Now, the US Department of Justice has said officers from West Mercia Police can come and collect Mr Calderon.” But no one from the West Mercia Police or the DOJ is named or quoted, so that news is based on nothing but a shady lawyer’s mind reading. https://t.co/K3C8K3106k

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) September 12, 2024

The story is so far being carried only by BBC Hereford and Worcester, which sounds a bit provincial, and the bigger media are all standing back. 

 

Good for them, since BBC H&W is going out on a limb by trusting the Harry Dunn family's spokesman / advisor / PR hack and all-around hustler. Evidently, he professes to know the hopes of the West Mercia Police and also the mind of the U.S. Justice Department, which is rather more than a prudent journalist should take his word for. Until sources that have names and speak for the record say that extradition has been approved, don't believe it.    

Moreover, when it comes to extradition the U.S. Secretary of State, and not the Justice Department, has the sole authority to approve the removal of a U.S. citizen to a requesting country. The family's spokesman - so far - seems to lack insight into the SecState's mind. 

Extradition will probably be approved eventually, but nothing in the BBC H&W's story is credible. 

   

Harry Dunn Sequel Finally Gets Close to Show Time

That goofy kid cracks me up, but - seriously - don't lend him your car.

Well, a judge in Texas has now certified that Agent Double O Aspergers can be extradited to the UK. That sends the matter to the executive phase of extradition, and to the final decision of the SecState. 

Assuming Blinken agrees to extradite, there will be a trial date set in the UK, and if we have learned anything from following this story, it is that the UK takes a very long time to process this stuff. 

I'll skip ahead a bit and just assume that our hapless driver will be convicted. Upon that, I expect attention to shift to the international prisoner transfer program which creates the possibility that our International Man of Mystery could be sent back here to serve his UK-imposed sentence in a U.S. prison. 

I'll further predict that Team Harry Dunn will work with the few crumbs of speculation and misreporting that it has to insist that this sad sack is actually a master spy, and that he was at the center of some monstrous U.S. plot to do something unimaginably sinister when he caused a car crash last year. 

They'll have fun with that although, frankly, it will be a big, big, step down from their glory days of White House visits and media attention from years past. 

It's a sequel, after all, and those usually disappoint the audience.

      

Some Progress On the Harry Dunn Sequel, As Houston Court Hears Extradition Case

Isaac Calderon, international man of mystery

Many months ago we heard that the UK has requested extradition of a U.S. citizen who caused a traffic accident in which a British women was injured, an event that raised misguided comparisons with the Harry Dunn case. 

Finally, this week there was evidence that an actual extradition proceeding is really happening. Specifically, there was an initial hearing in a Houston court in which the defendant appeared and the court heard evidence provided by the UK police force that investigated the accident.

Here's the Sky News story about the court appearance: US soldier admits vaping before crash that left UK nurse unable to walk, extradition documents reveal. 

The nonsense starts with the term "soldier." The defendant is reportedly a member of the Texas Army National Guard, which is a one-weekend-a-month-and-two-weeks-a-year kind of thing. (Someone should explain to the UK press that the NG is our equivalent to their Territorial Army.) But the UK press and social media will cling to anything that makes this simple traffic accident by a private U.S. citizen into a machination of the U.S. government, and especially of its covert intelligence world.    

Agent Double O Aspergers might seem a very unlikely candidate to be a mastermind of espionage, but for fans of Team Harry Dunn, he'll do. 

The nonsense escalates from there, with the terms "Official Secrets Act," "intelligence solider," and "Secret Service" freely sprinkled all over news stories about the case. Ominously, they speculate he might even have been visiting the SAS base in Herefordshire, which suggests he was up to bilateral skullduggery.  

As for the real 23 year-old Texan behind all the media nonsense, we learned at the court hearing that he told the UK police he was vaping while driving too fast (70 MPH in a 50), struggled to use an unfamiliar stick shift, and was passing cars despite being perpetually confused by those foreign markings on British roads. He also said he was driving on personal business, and did not have insurance. 

I'm still curious about who owned the car. I'm assuming it wasn't a rental, given the lack of insurance.  

Well, it doesn't look good for our Texas Guardsman. However, there is still a long legal road to travel before he can be sent back to face UK justice. 

 

Courtesy of the U.S. Justice Department, here's a summary of the process that must be followed before a U.S. to UK extradition can take place:

“During the judicial phase, a court will determine whether the extradition request meets the requirements of the applicable extradition treaty and the law of the requested country. If so, the judicial authority will rule on whether the person may be extradited. If the judicial authority rules that the person may be extradited, the case enters the executive phase, in which an executive authority of the government of the requested country, usually a Prime Minister, Minister of Justice or Minister of Foreign Affairs (for the United States, the appropriate executive authority is the Secretary of State), will determine whether the requested country will surrender the wanted person in extradition.”

Both the judicial and the executive phases may be appealed.

All that process might just take us beyond the inauguration of the next POTUS, and hence, the next Secretary of State. 

 

The mystery grows.