Seventh defendant gets prison for Sudden Valley pot robbery

The final defendant has been sentenced to prison for a robbery in Sudden Valley that involved a gun, baseball bats, and a marijuana deal among teenagers.

Thomas David Lievanos, 20, was the eldest of the seven defendants. He received the most severe penalty, two years in prison, for his role in the crime.

On Feb. 23, two young men set up a deal for an ounce of marijuana over a Facebook chat. The deal was arranged through the account of Jeremy Scott Bolden, 18, though his cousin might have been using the account, according to charging papers. Regardless, Bolden was aware that the deal had been set up.

The alleged dealer, 17, and two friends, a teenage couple, arrived in Sudden Valley around 5 p.m. and parked a Ford Expedition a few hundred feet south of Bolden’s home. The girl, 16, stayed in the car, while her boyfriend and the driver walked to a nearby park.

Bolden, 18, walked out of his house, 28 Rocky Ridge Drive, and asked “Waz up fools?” (sic), according to charging papers. Then he went back inside. He later told police he felt scared of the two young men.

The two teens could see people moving around in the house, and moments later, a group of seven young men rushed outside, some of them wielding baseball bats, their faces covered with masks or bandanas, shouting, “Whoop! Whoop!”

The teens escaped into the woods.

Robbery and arrests

The group went up to the Ford and tried to open the door. The girl had been lying down in the backseat. She sat up thinking that her friends had come back. Instead she saw the masked men. One of the young men had a silver handgun.

Someone said, “We’re robbing you! Get out of the car!”

So she unlocked the door. Just then a young man with a bat shattered a side window, spraying glass onto the girl. She fled the car, hid behind a tree and watched as the men carried her backpack, purse and her friends’ backpacks from the car to the house.

Neighbors saw the masked boys with bats running along Rocky Ridge. They called police. The alleged marijuana dealer and his friend, 19, called police, too, from a nearby house. One assailant they identified as Bolden, who still wore the same clothes from the first encounter, and another as Bolden’s cousin, 16.

Sheriff’s deputies set up a perimeter and tried to get the suspects out of the house. The homeowner was in the hospital with a broken leg, they learned, but she knew Bolden had been letting friends and family stay at the house.

Eventually five young men and two girls, age 14, came out of the house with their hands up. Two more young men, Lievanos and Ricardo Munoz Alcala Jr., 18, ran out the back door. They were pursued by police dogs and arrested.

Alcala admitted he used a baseball bat to break out a car window. He and Bolden claimed Lievanos had the gun. Lievanos denied it. At a follow-up interview he told deputies that the gun wasn’t loaded at the time of the robbery, and that the gun “may” still be in the house, according to charging papers.

The gun wasn’t found, the deputy prosecutor, James Hulbert, said at Lievanos’ sentencing hearing.

Teens sentenced

Deputies had to piece together much of what happened from interviews with the suspects. Some of those stories came off as self-serving, but some stories did not, Hulbert said.

All seven young men were charged with conspiracy to commit robbery in the first degree, attempted robbery in the first degree, robbery in the first degree and theft in the second degree.

All but one of the defendants pleaded guilty to reduced charges.

▪  Lievanos admitted to robbery in the second degree and attempted theft in the first degree. He was sentenced Thursday, Dec. 3, by Superior Court Judge Raquel Montoya-Lewis.

▪  Bolden was sentenced to six months in jail for robbery in the second degree.

▪  Alcala received a three-month sentence for robbery in the second degree.

▪  Chayanne Infante, 19, was sentenced to 90 days, with 80 days suspended, for disorderly conduct.

Three 16-year-old boys were charged as adults. Two of those cases eventually were moved to juvenile court.

▪  Bolden’s cousin, the boy the victims recognized, received a sentence of 15 to 36 weeks of juvenile detention for robbery in the second degree.

▪  A second boy was sentenced in juvenile court to 10 days of community service for disorderly conduct.

▪  The third boy, another one of Bolden’s cousins, was evaluated for mental competency in April. Since he’s a juvenile the results of that evaluation are confidential. The case against him was dismissed in May.

This story was originally published December 8, 2015 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Seventh defendant gets prison for Sudden Valley pot robbery."