A serial thief found with roughly $60,000 worth of stolen bicycles just outside Charlottesville city limits is expected to offer a guilty plea later this month that will provide him something he’s thus far avoided: jail time.
The court file for 42-year-old Joe Abel Arevalo, arrested more than two years ago, is marked for a guilty plea to a single charge of receiving stolen property in Albemarle County Circuit Court.
Jail sentences for purely property crimes are rare in the local courts, but Arevalo’s recent heists appear to be legion, as court documents show that police raided his rented Reservoir Road property in November 2022 and began finding more bicycles under blue tarps than they could promptly haul away. The authorities eventually rented a U-Haul truck and a shipping container for moving and then storing the 327 items seized in the raid as they set about trying to reunite people with their bicycles and other equipment.
Initially, Arevalo was hit with multiple felony counts, including two grand larceny charges in Charlottesville and two grand larceny charges in Albemarle County, as well as a drug charge for a methamphetamine-encrusted pipe that Albemarle police claimed to have found inside his residence. But over the past two years, those prosecutions have encountered myriad delays, with most of the charges, including the drug charge, dropped.
The first conviction stemming from the Reservoir Road raid came in late August, a case that appeared to have an array of electronic evidence.
A young man returning to his Fifth Street Extended-area residence found his Yeti SB100 bicycle, a $5,000 item, missing from his garage. Checking his surveillance footage, he saw a man gesturing with his middle finger at the camera and then loading the two-wheeler into a gray Toyota 4Runner.
Arevalo drives a Toyota 4Runner, and the young man had also surreptitiously bolted an Apple AirTag to his Yeti, which he tracked to a stone wall on Reservoir Road next door to Arevalo’s residence.
While the first judge to hear that case, Claude Worrell, rejected a no-jail plea agreement in February, Charlottesville Commonwealth Attorney Joe Platania returned with another no-jail deal in August.
"Is this the same plea agreement that Judge Worrell rejected?" asked Warren County Judge William Sharp, presiding over the case in Charlottesville Circuit Court. "If it’s different, then I will consider it."
"There’s enough that’s different," replied Platania, "but I don’t want to lose credibility with the court."
Platania went on to inform Sharp at the Aug. 27 hearing that the new plea agreement would carry one year of probation and a five-year suspended sentence to hang over Arevalo for possible reimposition if he were to transgress again within that span. Both punishments were provisions of the rejected plea, but this one also charged Arevalo $403 in court costs.
Shortly before Platania offered the similar deal, Arevalo was facing the potential of jail time for discharging pepper spray amid a fight he was allegedly trying to break up, and Platania subsequently revealed that he anticipated that Arevalo would receive some prison time over the pepper-spray charge.
However, unknown to Platania at that time was that the county grand jury meeting in early June had declined to certify the pepper-spray charge. Still, Platania stands by his decision not to seek jail time for the Yeti theft.
"We view incarceration as a punishment for individuals who are committing violence," Platania told The Daily Progress. "We focus on the prevention of crime and hope that a suspended sentence with probation and the threat of imposing suspended time will prevent him from doing it again."
"In this case," Platania continued, "all the property that could be was returned, the victims were consulted, and I’m not sure in this case what locking him up would do beyond pure punishment."
But as another prosecutor in Platania’s office revealed in court earlier last year, Arevalo is expected to receive an active jail sentence when he gets sentenced later this month on his sole surviving Albemarle charge.
One of the dropped cases was a city charge alleging a caught-on-camera theft of some metal electrical conduit piping from Rexall, an electrical supply company on Fifth Street Extended. Another dropped case was a county grand larceny charge involving a Freedom trailer found during the Reservoir Road raid.
The county case marked for a guilty plea this month concerns the April 13, 2022, theft of a Ditch Witch on a Hudson trailer, each component topping the $1,000 threshold for a grand larceny charge, though the single charge lodged for both items was later modified to receiving stolen property.
While these cases were coming to court and getting repeatedly continued, Arevalo received his stiffest punishment for something he did supposedly in the name of peace.
A party-thrower of sorts, Arevalo had sponsored some public event at Extreme Pizza at 5th Street Station in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville. On March 17, a fight broke out, and Arevalo was arrested and jailed for felony gas discharge and for violating a bail condition to refrain from trouble. In addition to allegedly deploying pepper spray, he was found to be carrying a "weapon," a bail violation. The weapon was a stun stick, also known as a cattle prod.
According to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, Arevalo spent about five weeks there this year.
Thanks to the grand jury’s decision not to certify the gas charge, the final charge Arevalo faces is the anticipated county conviction under a plea deal for the Ditch Witch and its trailer. That case comes to Albemarle Circuit Court on Jan. 27.
Arevalo’s prior convictions include breaking and entering, grand larceny, domestic assault, and trespassing plus a pair of convictions for failure to appear.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com