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A U.S. fugitive who spent more than 20 years in Toronto while fleeing manslaughter charges has been extradited to Florida.
According to public records, Patrick Lutts Jr. was flown to Orlando on Thursday and taken into U.S. custody at the airport.
CBC News previously reported that Lutts, 52, lived openly in Toronto after skipping a plea hearing in an Orlando court in 2003.
With a warrant out for his arrest, Lutts hosted monthly trivia nights at a Toronto bar and provided relationship advice to clients as a self-styled psychic.
His arrest in February 2025 by Toronto police’s fugitive squad came after a Crime Stoppers-type service in Florida received an anonymous tip about his whereabouts in November 2023.
The tip appears to have come from a U.S.-based internet sleuth who claims to have used facial recognition technology and social media clues to track Lutts to Toronto.
Lutts was charged with two counts of DUI manslaughter after his truck smashed into a vehicle carrying 19-year-old Nancy Lopez and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Darvin Javier DeJesus-Taboada, on Christmas morning in Orlando in 1998. The couple was killed on impact.
Nancy Lopez, left, and boyfriend Darvin Javier DeJesus-Taboada were killed in an early-morning Christmas Day crash in Orlando in 1998. (Submitted by Ralph Cordero)
“You just left,” Lopez’s cousin Jorge Leon said of Lutts’s years on the run. “You were a coward.”
Investigators said the Texas-born Lutts had spent Christmas Eve drinking and had a blood-alcohol level more than three times the legal limit and a “strong odour of alcohol coming from his breath.”
Lopez’s stepbrother Ralph Anthony Cordero told CBC News earlier this year that her family never lost hope that Lutts would be found, even after more than two decades on the lam.
“It was very pleasing to see that he’s no longer running free,” Cordero said. “The motivator” for Lopez’s loved ones, Cordero said, “was to ensure that this guy does not die before we get our hands on him.”
Court documents show Lutts was booked in Orange Country jail on Thursday and a hearing is set for March 5.
Lutts faces two charges of felony second-degree manslaughter, and could be sentenced to 30 years in prison if convicted.
After his arrest in Toronto, Lutts acknowledged in a sworn affidavit “leaving for Canada and not facing the Florida charge was a mistake.”
“I thought that authorities would be able to find me as I stayed in the same place in Toronto for over 20 years,” Lutts wrote. “That day just never came until now, but I am tired of running.”