SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 A former East Bay resident who was extradited back to the United States after fleeing to Honduras has been sentenced to five years for fentanyl trafficking, court records show.<\/p>\n
Gustavo Erazo was sentenced earlier this month by Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, court records show. Erazo was indicted with two others in 2023, after a series of federal raids the previous year, targeting a drug ring\u2019s stash houses in Oakland and Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Approximately 15 pounds of the deadly drug were found at the Berkeley stash house, and about one-and-a-half pounds were found at Erazo\u2019s Oakland home, prosecutors said. All told, more than $50,086 in cash was also seized, most of which was in the possession of one of Erazo\u2019s co-defendants.<\/p>\n
Erazo\u2019s case was highlighted by the U.S. Department of Justice last year, after he was extradited from Honduras to face charges in the Bay Area. Erazo\u2019s co-defendants, Melvin Diaz-Arteaga and Luis Erazo-Centeno, were sentenced to 78 and 56 months in federal prison, respectively.<\/p>\n
In court filings, Erazo\u2019s attorney described his tragic background and argued for leniency, writing that Erazo, \u201cwas born in Honduras and raised, along with five siblings, in extreme poverty; he recounted that he was forced to start working at age 10 and went hungry at times,\u201d then lost his brother to gun violence at age 12.<\/p>\n
Erazo came to the United States in 2000, spending time in Georgia, taking a brief return to Honduras to be with his family, then coming to San Francisco, where he began selling fentanyl in the city\u2019s Tenderloin neighborhood, according to court records.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you do things that you know aren\u2019t right, it\u2019s not because you want to do something bad, but it\u2019s just necessity,\u201d Erazo told his probation officer, according to the defense sentencing memo. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a place to live. I wish I had been able to do something else for money.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 A former East Bay resident who was extradited back to the United States after fleeing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[861,50315,59758,862,59760,59759,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-111421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bay-area-crime","tag-berkeley-arrest","tag-berkeley-fentanyl-bust","tag-california-crime","tag-honduras-drug-bust","tag-honduras-extradition","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}