The Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) revealed Tuesday that Jose Carmen Sian was not the only man named Jose extradited from a foreign country to Santa Ana last Thursday.
But the second Jose got away again, in a sense.
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Jose Sian, Accused of Getting 12 y.o. Santa Ana Girl Pregnant, is Extradited from Guatemala
Sian fled to Guatemala after being accused of sexually assaulting a child in Santa Ana in 2009. The 42-year-old was returned to Orange County on the same day as 46-year-old Jose Luis Pereda, who was convicted of domestic violence and child abduction in 2011, sentenced to a year in prison but given credit for jail time served and, after an alleged parole violation, fled to Spain.
Pereda had been found guilty of two felony counts of child abduction, one felony count of domestic battery with corporal injury, and one misdemeanor count of domestic violence battery for crimes that occurred in 2005. Besides the jail time, he was placed on five years of formal probation.
Less than a month after his sentencing, Pereda violated and absconded from probation and became the subject of an arrest warrant, according to the OCDA, which notes its investigators, Interpol and the FBI later tracked him to the Middle East, Poland and, eventually, Spain.
After Pereda's arrest in Spain, the U.S. Marshals Service transported him back to Orange County, where he admitted his parole violation at a hearing Monday. Prosecutors and the Orange County Probation Department argued for a “mid-term sentence” of three years in state prison. But Commissioner Vickie Hix chose the low term of two years in state prison, again gave Pereda credit for time he spent in jail before his 2011 trial and ordered him released on parole again.
The OCDA still racked it up as a victory, however, noting that in 2013-14 the agency has extradited eight international fugitives from countries like Canada, Mexico, Panama and the aforementioned Guatemala and Spain. Prosecutors also successfully brought home to OC a child who had been abducted and relocated in the Netherlands. The OCDA says there are 50 other individuals throughout the world they are working on bringing back here.
“Whether it is before or after conviction, we are going to continue to bring fugitives to justice to ensure they are held accountable for the harm they have caused,” says District Attorney Tony Rackauckas in a statement. “Bringing these defendants to justice will help bring closure to victims and prevent innocent people from becoming future victims.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.