Anahola man gets 5 years in jail

LIHUE — An Anahola man was sentenced on Thursday to five years in jail for violating the terms of his probation by committing a litany of crimes, among them choking a woman, assaulting a police officer and neglecting to register as a sex offender.

Beau Lopez, 33, signed a plea deal in May that resolved seven separate cases pending against him. In exchange for his no-contest plea, prosecutors agreed to drop one misdemeanor, convert two felony charges to misdemeanors, and recommend that the judge give Lopez a five-year sentence instead of the decades he could have spent in jail if convicted at trial.

Even with the plea bargain, Lopez still faced three class C felonies, each of which potentially carried extended 10-year jail terms, and another three misdemeanors. But the new charges were only half of the problem for Lopez.

Last year, when prosecutors charged him with abuse of a family or household member for choking a woman he was living with, Lopez was about seven months into a five-year probation sentence he was given after pleading guilty to seven felonies in four different cases he had picked up over the previous five years.

Among the list of offenses Lopez pleaded guilty to was one count of abuse of a family or household member, a crime he had been charged with in 2013 for, among other things, strangling his former girlfriend, who, at the time, was pregnant with his son, according to a letter prosecutors attached to the plea deal Lopez signed in January 2018.

In the letter, the prosecuting attorney handling the case said Lopez endangered the life of the woman carrying his unborn child “by nearly causing multiple accidents” while driving down the road high on methamphetamine. Shortly after choking the woman, the prosecutor’s letter said, Lopez accidentally hit her in the stomach and, later that evening, forced her to have sex against her will.

The plea bargain resolved two other 2013 cases against Lopez that stemmed from incidents that occurred a few months later. Just over two weeks after the birth of his son, prosecutors said Lopez broke into the home of the newborn’s mother, stealing her iPhone and some money and, four days later, went back to the house, “breaking a baby’s crib, breaking a telephone, and destroying a bible.”

About a week later, Lopez broke into the home again, ruined more household items and physically assaulted his former girlfriend, according to the prosecutor’s letter, which concludes a summary of those incidents by saying police officers later observed red marks on the woman’s neck.

Lopez started beating and threatening another woman a few years later, according to court documents in the numerous felony cases he would accumulate over the next several years, many of which were resolved with his January 2018 plea deal and subsequent sentence of five years probation, the conditions of which he promptly and repeatedly violated.

In the 10 months following the date he started probation on April 19, 2018, Lopez was arrested three times. He has been in police custody since Feb. 21, when police picked him up on an outstanding warrant for failing to comply with sex-offender-registration requirements.

The five-year term of incarceration Lopez was sentenced to on Thursday encompassed penalties for six new crimes and probation violations in four cases.

His list of offenses carried a combined total of nearly 40 years worth of jail time, even without the charges that had been dismissed or reduced in the plea bargain, and prosecutors had the option to seek at least another 15 years under Hawaii statutes that allow extended terms of imprisonment for repeat offenders of violent crimes.

But like most defendants convicted on multiple counts, Lopez’s jail sentences are set to run concurrently. In other words, despite being sentenced to seven, five-year terms — three for failing to register as a sex offender, plus four probation violations — and two, one-year terms for misdemeanor offenses, Lopez will be out in five years or less, depending on how the parole board handles his case.

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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.