https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 543055002/Man who stole $1.2 million in fajitas sentenced to 50 years in prison
A former Texas juvenile center employee who confessed to stealing $1.2 million in fajitas received a 50-year prison sentence last week.
Officers last summer found fajitas in the fridge of Gilberto Escamilla, a then-employee of the the Cameron County Juvenile Justice Department who later admitted to stealing and reselling the marinated meat over years.[nine years]
“It was selfish. It started small and got bigger and out of control,” Escamilla said during his testimony, according to the Brownsville Herald. “It got to the point where I couldn’t control it anymore.”
An 800-pound fajita delivery sparked confusion last summer when it arrived at the juvenile center in San Benito, about 10 miles north of the Mexico border. That's because the center didn't serve fajitas.
Escamilla, the employee who usually received such orders, had taken the day off. A trail of invoices and vouchers eventually led investigators to Escamilla, totaling a theft of $1,251,578.
Cameron County Assistant District Attorney Peter Gilman asked for the 50-year sentencing to send "a strong message," the newspaper reported. The visiting state district judge, J. Manuel Banales, made it so.
When was the last time a person found guilty of stealing 1.2 million dollars worth of merchandise (over a nine year period) was sentenced to 50 years in prison?
(For a little perspective, the sentencing guidelines for Bill Cosby's convictions call for a prison sentence of around 22 months...)
Maybe I could see something like this, if there was some evidence that what he was doing was negatively impacting the welfare of the kids at the detention center, but that does not appear to be the case. (He wasn't diverting food from the residents; he was ordering additional food that apparently wasn't even typically served at the center)
And what the hell kind of auditing procedures do they have that this was able to go on undetected for nine years (and apparently still wouldn't have been detected if Mr. Escamilla had shown up for work the day the last meat delivery was made.)
I get that they want a particularly stiff sentence for deterrence because a government employee is involved, but it seems to me that in a case like this a sentence of 10-15 years would have achieved that...
Seems to me that the ones who should be getting 50 year prison sentences are the judges who've been convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for handing down long sentences to juvenile offenders being sent to private detention facilities, not a relative small potatoes thief like this whose actions should have been found out long before they got to this point.
