A former Reading man has been sentenced to 17 to 34 years in state prison in the drive-by killing of a woman in the city in 1998.
Israel Mendoza, 46, entered an open plea to third-degree murder and was sentenced Friday by Berks County Judge Eleni Dimitriou Geishauser. An open plea allows the judge to determine the sentence because there is no agreement between the prosecution and the defense on a sentence.
Mendoza will begin serving that sentence after he completes serving a seven-year federal prison term for trafficking cocaine in Connecticut.
Mendoza, who originally was charged in 1998, had been a fugitive for 25 years until members of the U.S. Marshal’s Service and Mexican law enforcement officers took him into custody in Jaliscol, Mexico, in August 2023.
“I’m very pleased with the effort of the Reading police department and my office to resurrect the case from 28 years ago,” District Attorney John T. Adams said Monday. “It was not an easy task. They put in a lot of hard work to get what I consider a great resolution. We were very fortunate to find Mendoza, who had been in Mexico for many years, with the assistance of federal authorities.”
Mendoza and Robert Radhames-Herrera, 47, were charged in the killing of Michele Lutz, who was shot in the back at Front and Elm streets on Aug. 2, 1998.
Two others, Placido Rodriguez and Joshua Ramirez, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and were each sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison. Ramirez was driving with the other three men as passengers, police said.
Investigators said neither Rodriguez nor Ramirez fired the shots, but they are culpable because they were engaged with the shooters in hunting a male they believed had shot one of their friends.
The shooting left Lutz’s then 4-year-old son motherless.
Radhames-Herrera was 20 at the time and remains at large.
“I would not doubt that he is in Mexico,” Adams said. “He faces the same charges as Mendoza.
Mendoza was returned to Berks in June after he was sentenced in the federal drug case and transferred to his permanent facility.
In the federal drug case, a grand jury in Hartford on Oct. 31, 2019, indicted Mendoza and three others on narcotics-trafficking charges. Mendoza remained a fugitive until his arrest last year.
Officials said the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s Narcotics and Bulk Cash Trafficking Task Force in 2018 began investigating a Hartford-area narcotics-trafficking operation that was mailing parcels of drugs and drug proceeds.
In April, Mendoza was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kari A. Dooley in Bridgeport, Conn., to three years of supervision following his release from prison.
Mendoza pleaded guilty on Oct. 1, 2024, to conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute heroin and cocaine.