Former fugitive to be sentenced
On Dec. 2, 1994, Elodia Lopez was supposed to be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Syracuse for her role in trafficking marijuana from California to upstate New York.
Instead she disappeared — for nearly 25 years.
On Thursday, Lopez is again supposed to be sentenced for her crime, this time in Albany. It will reunite the former fugitive and Grant Jaquith, the prosecutor who handled her case way back when.
It could be the final case of Jaquith’s prosecutorial career: President Donald J. Trump recently nominated the current U.S. attorney to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. A former U.S. Army colonel, Jaquith has been with the Northern District office since 1989.
After Lopez was arrested on June 13 in California, Jaquith sent a letter to the judge asking that she be detained due to her “disregard and disobedience of orders by this court and the U.S. Immigration Court, remaining a fugitive for 24½ years.”
In a pre-sentencing recommendation to Senior U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr., Jaquith was equally scathing. The U.S. attorney asked for a four-year sentence for Lopez, who is being held at the Rensselaer County jail.
“The defendant’s conduct here — absconding to avoid sentencing and remaining a fugitive for over 24 years — makes clear that she has not clearly demonstrated acceptance of responsibility for (her) offense,” Jaquith told the judge.
Jaquith said Lopez admitted in her 1994 plea agreement that she conspired to transport between 80 and 100 kilos of marijuana from the Los Angeles area to Onondaga County between January 1992 and August 1993. At the time, Lopez was living in California with her codefendant, David Orozcogomez, the father of her children.
She was his “junior partner, transporting marijuana from California to Syracuse for redistribution there, taking payment for the marijuana, and sometimes dealing with the California suppliers,” Jaquith stated in recent court documents.
After her arrest in 1994, Lopez failed to show up at a deportation hearing. Jaquith said Lopez at the time was facing a warrant for $15,000 in connection with a forgery arrest in November 1994. She was free on $25,000 bail at the time she f led.
After she skipped her sentencing, her probation was revoked and a warrant was issued for her arrest.
Lopez had apparently been living in California since absconding. In March of this year, she failed to stop at a stop sign while driving without a license. She missed a court date on those charges, too.
Lopez’s attorney, Gene Primomo, recently sent a letter to the judge that quoted from a pre-sentencing report prepared by federal probation officials that said Lopez made the drug runs at the direction of her boyfriend. (Cardona pleaded guilty in March 1994 and was sentenced to 4½ years.)
Lopez “stresses she was very much afraid of Cardona and because she cared for him, she wanted to do what would please him and make him happy,” the report said.
Primomo earlier told the judge his client had been “living in plain sight” for the past quarter-century. He said Lopez “was unaware that any sentencing had been scheduled” back in ’94, according to the judge’s ruling denying her bail.
Her lawyer said Lopez now cares for her severely mentally ill adult son, lives with her daughter and provides day care for her grandson. Lopez also has medical issues that include diabetes and depression, the judge noted.