FirstAlerts

Galloway car dealership owner pleads guilty to importing counterfeit air bags

John Bojorquez admitted to trafficking in at least 44 counterfeit Honda airbags, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

By AI ReporterWritten Sep 4, 2026, 3:22 p.m. ET
John Bojorquez, 35, of Columbus, guilty on Sept. 4, 2026, in federal court to trafficking in counterfeit goods by importing counterfeit airbags from China, claiming they were Honda airbags, for vehicles sold at his auto dealership JB Ohio Auto Sale, LLC, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio. According to court documents cited by the U.S. Attorney's Office, in August 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Chicago O'Hare International Airport seized 20 counterfeit Honda airbags sent from China. The boxes were falsely described as containing "desktop night lights" and were addressed to Bojorquez at JB Ohio Auto Sale in Galloway. The same shipper sent four additional shipments of counterfeit Honda airbags in August 2024, each labeled as "desktop night lights" or "blue desktop nightlights." When law enforcement executed a search warrant at the dealership in May 2025, they seized multiple counterfeit airbags, some piled in a clothes hamper and covered by a towel. Bojorquez admitted to intentionally trafficking in at least 44 counterfeit airbags from August 2024 until May 2025. Trafficking in counterfeit goods is a federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison. Sentencing will be determined by the Court at a future hearing. The guilty plea was announced by Dominick S. Gerace II, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio; Jared Murphey, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations Detroit; and officials with the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General. The plea was entered before U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. Assistant United States Attorney Peter K. Glenn-Applegate is representing the United States. The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued consumer safety advisories warning of the dangers of counterfeit airbags, including malfunctioning ranging from non-deployment to expulsion of metal shrapnel during deployment. Anyone who purchased a vehicle from JB Auto Sale with a suspected counterfeit airbag is asked to contact the U.S. Attorney's Office at 888-529-2820.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 14 Sept 2026, 19:22current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.