Yanira Maldonado, the 42-year old mother from Arizona who was held for nine days in jail for mistaken drug charges, is finally coming home to the U.S., NBC News reports.
"I'm free. I'm free. I was innocent," she said to reporters upon her release from jail today, revealing that reading the Book of Mormon with other inmates and thinking about her family helped her get through the difficult time in jail.
Maldonado was with her husband in Mexico for a funeral on May 22 when she was detained by soldiers who found 12 pounds of marijuana taped under her seat on a bus that she was taking back to the U.S.
A mother of seven, she was born in Mexico and is a naturalized American citizen, and stressed to reporters that her detainment was a "mistake" and the fault of "a few people," not the entire country.
"I love Mexico. My family is still there," she said to reporters. "Mexico is a beautiful country. Please don't take it wrong."
Maldonado was released late Thursday afternoon after court officials reviewed security footage that showed her and her husband boarding the bus and only carrying blankets, water and her purse with them. Maldonado sat in her cell for wondering if she could have to wait months for a trial to begin, unsure of her fate as her court hearings went on all week long. She praised her lawyer for providing the footage, a key piece of evidence in the ruling.
"It's clear, indisuputable evidence that [Maldonado and her husband] didn't have anything to do with it," Brandon Klippel, Maldonado's lawyer, told reporters on "TODAY."
After being released from jail, Maldonado walked into the arms of her husband, Gary, and was driven back to the U.S. She said her time in jail was "very sad."
"My faith and my family kept me going," she said.
While in jail, she found a copy of the Book of Mormon and read it and prayed with other inmates. Despite her time in jail being stressful, she said she was treated respectfully, and she would like to return to Mexico, just not in the near future.
"They can't wait to see me," she said of her seven children back home in Arizona. Maldonado and her family had proclaimed she was innocent of the drug charges before her release.
Maldonado said before her release that she may have been set up at the military border checkpoint between Mexico and the U.S., where soldiers initially accused her husband of smuggling in drugs before then accusing Maldonado.
"I just want to be back home right now with my family, my kids and my husband,'' she told Miguel Almaguer in an interview that aired Thursday morning on "TODAY". "I wanted to find a way out, and I'm telling them I'm innocent, I'm innocent. I keep saying what happened, and I'm still here, so I just have faith in the Lord."
