Jones, who turns 30 on Sunday, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Walter Rice to prison and to 100 hours of community service or job training. Rice said the sentence would be served consecutively to any given in pending cases in Vinton and Butler counties. Jones has been incarcerated for about 21 months.
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Defense attorney Nicholal Gounaris asked Rice to consider Jones’ upbringing — Jones’ father killed his mother, and he saw her body when children were removed from the residence — and that the only male role models he had taught him the drug trade.
“He can be saved,” Gounaris said in front of more than a dozen Jones supporters in the courtroom. “He is redeemable.”
Assistant U.S. prosecutor Brent Tabacchi said that to just point out the night of the standoff as a one-time event undersells the situation dramatically.
“Mr. Jones is no Robin Hood, no petty criminal out there selling drugs to support his family,” Tabacchi said, noting several drug trafficking convictions and an ongoing case in Butler County. “He is a career criminal. This is what he does for a living.”
Rice noted Jones — whom he called a danger to society — now has 16 felony convictions with more pending, and had 56 violations while in state custody. Rice said Jones was found with marijuana in his rectum and has a misdemeanor assault case, both from his activity in Montgomery County Jail.
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Rice said he believes Jones’ sincerity about changing his life, but that the defendant “totally lacks tools and ability to carry those promises into reality.”
Before his sentence was announced in Dayton’s U.S. District Court, Jones told Rice that he took full responsibility for his actions. Jones apologized to his friends and family — many of whom wrote letters of support on his behalf — and said he’d like to be around to help raise his infant daughter.
“I’m not glorifying or excusing my behavior,” Jones said, who wrote in a letter to Rice that he isn’t the man police and media have made him out to be. “But I don’t need a decade or two to realize what I did was horribly wrong.”
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Jones pleaded guilty in April 2017 to two of four indicted counts in exchange for the dismissal of two counts. Jones pleaded guilty to trafficking fentanyl and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors removed language from the second count that said Jones had more than 400 grams of fentanyl so that there was no minimum mandatory sentence.
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Tabacchi said that while he doesn’t doubt the love for and from Jones’ family, but in his present state, “Mr. Jones is an absolute menace to society” who gave himself the “El Chapo Jr.” moniker.
“He may have written off his nickname as just a nickname,” Tabacchi said. “He may regret it now, but he gave himself that nickname for a reason.”
Rice said that in pre-sentence information given to the court, Jones said he went back to drug dealing after his last prison sentence because he liked the money and said he was making more than $100,000 per week.
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Court documents detailed that after the March 31-April 1, 2016, standoff at The Meadows of Catalpa apartment complex in Harrison Twp., law enforcement found three cell phones, a tablet computer, kilogram wrappers, a handgun, bulletproof vests, more than $100,000 in cash and three suspected burnt kilograms of fentanyl.
Court documents said Jones posted a live Facebook feed of him next to a fire in a bathroom and saying, “No evidence on me buddy.”
Jones’ non-binding advisory sentencing calculation was from 15 years, 8 months to 19 years, 7 months. The statutory maximum for the drug conviction was 20 years and a $1 million fine and 10 years and a $250,000 fine for the weapons charge.
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