GILROY
– A judge sentenced a Gilroy man who burglarized two houses
while the residents were home to seven years and eight months in
prison Monday.
GILROY – A judge sentenced a Gilroy man who burglarized two houses while the residents were home to seven years and eight months in prison Monday.
Robert Heredia, 44, pleaded no contest to two counts of burglary on March 25. His sentence was agreed upon at that time.
In the past, he was convicted of attempted burglary in Monterey County and spent more than a year in Santa Clara County Jail for multiple drunk-driving convictions, according to court records.
Heredia was a Golden Glove boxer and Gilroy High School quarterback in the late 1970s, according to his younger brother Samuel, who lives in San Francisco. Heredia later worked as a firefighter in Oregon and served in the Navy, receiving an honorable discharge.
Heredia also has had a long, intermittent drug and alcohol dependency, hios brother said.
Heredia’s troubles began on Nov. 2, when a female resident of Santa Teresa Drive said she awoke to the sound of the front door opening at 4:50 a.m. She assumed her adult son had come home and got up to check on him.
Instead, she found that her son was in bed asleep, but lights were on, the door was ajar and her purse and its contents were strewn on the floor. She also noticed that $500 had been stolen from the house.
Moments later, a woman who was staying as a guest at a house a block south was watching television on the living-room couch when Heredia entered an unlocked front door and walked into the hall, she told police. The two made eye contact through a glass-paned door. Then he waved, said, “Bye,” and ran out onto the street.
As police officer Marty Beltran arrived in his patrol car, he said he saw Heredia running south on the sidewalk, about a block-and-a-half away. When Heredia saw the patrol car approach, he flung himself onto a lawn and tried to hide by lying flat on the grass, Beltran reported. Beltran arrested him without incident, finding $500 in his possession.
While Beltran was handcuffing Heredia, the woman who saw Heredia in the hallway ran up, pointed at him and told police she had just seen him in the house.
Heredia had no home address at the time of his arrest. Samuel said he was “couch surfing” with family and friends in Gilroy.
A few days before, Heredia had stayed with Samuel in San Francisco. They talked about getting Robert into a rehabilitation program there. He told his brother he was only going back to Gilroy for a few days.
“I was big-time surprised and disappointed,” Samuel said of hearing about his brother’s arrest. “I knew that if he was going to stay in Gilroy, he was going to fall back into his old pattern of drinking and the chemical use. … (But) he seemed really level-headed (this time).”
Heredia has participated in a drug rehabilitation program in county jail.
