Man who sold cars in Eastern WA with odometers rolled back headed to prison

An Othello man has been sentenced to one year and three months in federal prison after buying used cars and then reselling them in Eastern Washington after installing odometers showing much lower mileage.

Reynaldo Valdez Garza Jr. also is ordered to pay restitution of $21,080, a fraction of what the prosecution alleges he cost his customers.

In October after a three-day trial in Spokane, a jury found Garza, then 53, guilty of five felony counts of odometer tampering.

But the Eastern Washington U.S. Attorney’s Office says that as more people who bought cars from him have come forward, it has compiled a list of 21 vehicles with a total of more than 2 million miles rolled back on their odometers.

The average rollback for each vehicle was 126,832 miles, concealing an average of 10.7 years of use, wear and tear for each car or pickup, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeremy Kelley, in court documents.

He put the total loss at $171,763 for about 20 known buyers.

That included $36,230 on the cars for which Garza was found guilty of odometer tampering.

The prosecution’s estimate included a calculation of the vehicle’s remaining lifetime miles at the time of purchase based on a valid odometer reading, repairs buyers had done and the loss of value in selling their cars which no longer had clean mileage histories.

Odometers bought in wrecking yards

However, Garza’s attorney, Douglas Phelps of Spokane, argued that the prosecution had inflated the loss to Garza’s customers in an attempt to have Garza deported from the United States for committing an aggravated felony.

The prosecution replied that any possible collateral immigration consequences would be subject to an immigration judge’s decision and should not be considered in determining Garza’s sentence for odometer tampering.

Garza’s attorney also argued in a pretrial briefing that Adams County Sheriff Dale Wagner and his deputies had been biased in their investigation of the case because Garza had sold a car to the sheriff’s daughter.

Garza would buy high-mileage cars at low prices and then purchase odometers showing lower mileages from wrecking yards or used auto parts sellers to install in the cars, according to court documents.

In one case he contacted Cars 4 Less Auto Sales in Kennewick and said he could sell a 2012 Ford F-150 on its lot to one of his customers.

The car dealership gave Garza possession of the pickup with an odometer reading of 259,731 miles. Garza then tampered with the odometer to show mileage of 129,300 and sold it on behalf of Cars 4 Less for $14,000, according to court documents.

The car dealership was unaware of the mileage change, according to court documents.

Victims testified during the trial that the mileage was important to their decision to buy the vehicles and they would not have bought them if they knew the true mileage, according to court documents.

They dealt with problems that included “breaking down and being stranded, purchasing new transmissions and all the issues that come up in high-mileage vehicles,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Eastern Washington assistant U.S. attorneys in a court document.

The prosecution put the average lifetime mileage of a vehicle at 150,000.

Cars cause ‘stress and worry’

In one of the cases heard at trial, Allie Wagner testified that she was looking for a reliable car to drive when she started college. She bought a 2010 Ford Edge with an odometer reading of 115,000 from Garza in 2023, spending her entire savings of $4,000.

In truth, the Ford had been driven twice as many miles, or about 230,000 according to a court document.

The transmission failed on a freeway in Montana in what Allie Wagner called a “terrifying and dangerous experience.”

She had the transmission fixed and continued to use the car to travel the nine hours back and forth between college and home because she was not in a position to buy another car, according to court documents.

“What should have been a positive, exciting milestone — buying my first car and moving away to college — turned into a constant source of stress and worry,” she said, according to court documents.

In another claim, a single mother said she saved for a long time to pay $8,000 in cash to Garza for a 2010 Honda Pilot, which she now believes was far more than the car was worth.

The mileage had been rolled back from 259,158 to 132,000 miles, according to court documents.

She needed the car to take her child to school activities and her mother to frequent medical appointments in Seattle, the Tri-Cities and Othello.

“The vehicle has proven to be unreliable and unsafe,” stalling several times in remote areas and putting her family in dangerous and stressful situations, she said.

“I am now stuck with a vehicle that has a damaged history and will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to sell or trade in without a significant financial loss,” she said.

Other people who purchased vehicles from Garza submitted lists of the repairs they had to make, with one couple saying a day after buying a 2014 Kia Sorento for $6,000, the check engine light came on.

The odometer said 122,859 miles, but the true mileage was 205,807, and the couple who bought the car paid for multiple repairs, according to court documents.

“It caused us a lot of stress, and cost us more money,” the couple said in a court document.

Years of mileage rollbacks alleged

The defense said that Garza works as a semi truck driver and made a living near the poverty line.

But the prosecution alleged that Garza sold vehicles with altered odometers from at least September 2019 until he was charged in February 2024.

“Likely, his victims are much more numerous than those the United States has been able to identify,” the prosecution said in court documents. ”This is a long-running scheme for defendant. Defendant appears to have made his living off the fraud.”

The prosecution asked U.S. Judge Rebecca Pennell to sentence Garza to 2 years and three months in prison, and the defense recommended a sentence of six months.

In addition to a prison sentence of one year and three months, Pennell sentenced him to one year of probation.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Office of Odometer Fraud and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.

The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kelley and Jacob Brooks.