Fentanyl trafficker who fled to Honduras after winning bail sentenced in San Francisco
A Honduran drug trafficker who fled to his home country after winning bail, despite being found with 15 pounds of fentanyl in his backpack, only to be extradited back to the U.S., was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment today at San Francisco federal courthouse.
Gustavo Erazo was originally arrested in November 2022 after an investigation by SFPD and the Drug Enforcement Administration into his accomplice, Melvin Diaz, who they suspected of commuting from Oakland to San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood to sell narcotics. Erazo was detained with the huge drugs haul shortly after he left the stash house used by Diaz on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley.
Diaz was detained at the same time. Inside the stash house police found two guns, drug manufacturing equipment and $1,500 in cash.
At Erazo’s apartment on Oakland’s School Street, police found more than a pound of fentanyl and $6,661 in cash. A third defendant, Luis Almicar Erazo-Centeno, was arrested there while trying to flush drugs down a toilet
Initially charged by state authorities, he was bailed by an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
Shortly thereafter he ran away to Honduras.
On January 5 2023 a federal grand jury indicted Erazo in his absence with four counts of drug trafficking.
He was captured on November 8 2024 in Talanga in central Honduras and held in the national penitentiary north of Tegucigalpa before being extradited. He was taken under heavy security to the Palmerola Air Base, where he was handed over to DEA agents and flown back to the U.S. on December 19 2024.
Today U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer sentenced Erazo to five years imprisonment, agreeing with a joint recommendation by prosecutors, a defense attorney and a probation official.
Erazo had earlier pleaded guilty four drug trafficking offenses.
“I want to apologize to Northern California,” Erazo told the court today via a Spanish interpreter. “I did this because I didn’t have a job. Right now I just want to go back to my home country Honduras and teach my son good things not bad things like I did.”
Luis Almicar Erazo-Centeno was sentenced to 56 months in custody in May 2023 after pleading guilty to accessory after the fact. Diaz was given a 78 month prison term in February 2024 after pleading guilty to a battery of drugs offenses.
Diaz himself had an atrocious record of violence – including beating an elderly man to unconsciousness on a San Francisco street after he tried to intervene to stop him assaulting a teenage girl in 2021. He was released from jail after six months and, because city ‘sanctuary’ rules prevented anybody notifying immigration authorities, he went straight back to peddling fentanyl.
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