Man who targeted local Latinos sent to prison

WEST CHESTER »A twice-deported man who targeted Latino workers in southern Chester County in a string of home burglaries has been sentenced to a lengthy state prison term after being declared a “danger to society” by the judge hearing his case.

“This is not something we can let go on,” said President Judge Jacqueline Carroll Cody in sentencing German Soto-Moreno to 15 to 40 years in state prison for the burglaries that took place in five townships in August and September 2016. “I am going to have

to put you in jail for a long time.”

Soto-Moreno’s crimes were particularly flagrant, since he committed them after having been arrested, charged, convicted, sentenced, and deported in 2015 for the same illegal behavior. Authorities said that after being deported late that year by immigration officials, Soto-Moreno returned to his home in Chester, Delaware County, 12 days later to take up his crimes again.

Soto-Moreno owes more than $32,000 to the victims of his four home burglaries from 2013, and another $35,000 in restitution to those he stole from in the 2016 break-ins.

Deputy District Attorney Michelle Frei called the investigation into the burglaries and eventual apprehension of Soto-Moreno “amazing police work,” crediting state Trooper Stefano Gallena and then-New Garden Detective Keith Cowdright, now with the Chester County Detectives, with tracking him down. The two used photo recognition software and detailed record checking at a Delaware pawnshop to identify and find Soto-Moreno living in the Highland castles neighborhood of Chester.

“Their work was sound all around,” Frei said in praising the duo.

The defendant, who told probation investigators in a pre-sentence report that he had committed the burglaries to fund his heroin habit, begged forgiveness for his crimes and asked Cody for “one last opportunity” to changes his life.

“This time I’ve learned the life I was leading was the wrong way, doing drugs,” he said in a statement to the judge, after his common-law wife asked Cody to let him return to their home to help raise their three children. “I have hurt my family a lot. I beg for forgiveness, and leave it all in God’s hands.”

In sentencing SotoMoreno, Cody rejected the suggestion of his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Peter Jurs, to keep his overall sentence at five to 10 years. Jurs noted that SotoMoreno already faces an additional five years in federal prison for returning to the United States after being deported to Mexico following his 2015 sentence.

“He came back to be with his family,” Jurs explained. “He did the best he could at the time.”

Soto-Moreno was arrested by Gallena and Cowdright in December 2016. He pleaded guilty to seven counts of residential burglary in March.

According to Frei, his record of burglaries started in 2008 in Virginia, where he was arrested and served three years. Afterwards, he was deported as being an undocumented immigrant. He returned in 2011, however, and began committing new burglaries in Chester County in 2012.

He was apprehended, and served prison time before being sentence to a lengthy probationary sentence and deported. He returned in January 2016. He told investigators that he worked on a landscaping crew, but gave the money he earned from that to his wife, and used the funds he collected from his burglaries to buy heroin.

The burglaries police ultimately tied him to occurred in Lower Oxford, New Garden, London Grove, East Nottingham and Penn. Frei said his normal method was to wait until the house was empty, after having established that Mexican mushroom farm workers lived there. “It is our belief that the defendant was targeting them with the hope that they would not go to the police,” he explained.

Frei said that SotoMoreno would pry open a door to the house, and proceed directly to the main bedroom, where he knew the residents would keep their valuables and cash. He took jewelry almost exclusively, pawning it at a shop in Delaware.

Police investigators were able to identify and recover some of the jewelry taken when they checked the pawnshop that was located in Claymont, just over the border line from Pennsylvania on I-95 from his home in Chester. They found he had used a false permanent resident card as identification at the shop, and then used the photo on it to match with a facial recognition search, she told Cody.

Frei had asked the judge to sentence Soto-Moreno to 25 to 50 years in state prison for the seven burglaries, but also to add a long period of post-prison supervision to be able to punish him if he again attempts to return after his eventual third deportation. “All the previous efforts to rehabilitate him have failed,” she noted.

In the past, she said, courts had “allowed him to go back to Mexico to try to rebuild his life. Instead, he came back and did the same thing all over again.”