Local News

CORCORAN – California State Prison-Corcoran inmate Juan Vallejo Corona, 85, died of natural causes at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, March 4 at an outside hospital. Corona was serving 25 concurrent life sentences for 25 counts of first-degree murder. His victims were all farm workers.

In 1971, 25 bodies buried in orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County were found. All the victims were men who had been seen with Corona or had been hired through Corona’s Sutter County labor contracting business. The number of murders set a record in the United States at the time.

SACRAMENTO -  Timothy Brian Harrison, 50, of South Lake Tahoe, was sentenced today by United States District Judge John A. Mendez to one year and one day in prison and ordered to pay $113,000 in restitution for two counts of excavation and removal of archaeological resources from public lands and one misdemeanor count of unlawful possession of methamphetamine, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

According to court documents, Harrison conducted illegal digging at prehistoric Native American archaeological sites on federal lands in Alpine and El Dorado Counties, near Lake Tahoe. He collected tens of thousands of ancient artifacts from multiple archaeological sites, and virtually destroyed two very significant archaeological sites.

SACRAMENTO — A visitor who supplied a fatal amount of methamphetamine to an inmate has been sentenced to two years of incarceration, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) investigators said today. Johna Martinez-Meth, 46, of Clearlake pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in Solano County Superior Court and then was sentenced Feb. 21 by Solano County Superior Court Judge Robert Fracchia.

“CDCR is committed to stopping the flow of drugs into our prisons,” said Bryan Shill, deputy chief of CDCR’s Office of Correctional Safety. “Our investigators will diligently pursue those who smuggle narcotics into any state correctional facility, and we will seek justice through aggressive prosecution of violators.”

SACRAMENTO -  After a four-day trial, a jury found Ruslan Kirilyuk, 41, of Beverly Hills, guilty on Tuesday of 24 counts of wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, and one count each of aggravated identity theft and failure to appear, all arising out of his involvement in a nationwide credit card fraud scheme, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

According to evidence presented at trial, between approximately October 5, 2011, and March 5, 2014, Kirilyuk conspired with Mihran Melkonyan, 38, of Sacramento; Rouslan Akhmerov, 42, of Studio City; Alexandr Maslov, 38, of Sacramento, and others in a credit card billing scheme that involved creating approximately 71 fraudulent online companies established with the sole purpose of fraudulently charging approximately 119,000 stolen credit card numbers. In total, the members of the scheme billed the stolen credit card numbers for over $3.4 million in unauthorized charges.