Offered 40 years max, 2 plead guilty to armored truck guard Hector Trochez’s
New Orleans LA May 29 2021 Hoping to limit their prison sentences to 40 years, two men admitted in federal court Tuesday that they fatally shot an armored truck guard during a robbery outside a New Orleans bank in 2013.
Chukwudi Ofomata, 34, and Lilbear George, 31, pleaded guilty to illegally discharging a firearm during the killing of Loomis armored truck guard Hector Trochez, 45.
In return, during an hour-long hearing before U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, federal prosecutors requested that George be sentenced to between 30 years and 40 years in prison and Ofomata to a maximum of 40 years. Prosecutors also moved to dismiss charges pertaining to the planning and execution of the deadly stick-up.
Africk, who tentatively set a Sept. 29 sentencing date, must approve the plea deal. If he rejects it, Ofomata and George could withdraw their guilty pleas and proceed toward trial.
Relatives of Trochez attended Tuesday’s hearing, watching silently as the defendants — in shackles and prison jumpsuits — gave mostly one-word answers to a series of procedural questions from the judge.
As she left the courtroom, one woman accompanying the victim’s family said, “That’s what you call looking a gift horse in the mouth. We are giving them a gift.”
Attorneys for Ofomata and George declined comment.
Ofomata’s tentative plea deal has no effect on the state murder charges he is facing in connection with the 2008 shooting deaths of a couple whose burned bodies were found in a torched SUV.
Another defendant, Curtis Johnson, did not attend Tuesday’s hearing, maintaining his plea of not guilty and looking at a June 7 trial date. He could face up to life imprisonment if convicted.
Ofomata and George pleaded guilty two years after jurors convicted Jeremy Esteves of helping to plan and carry out the robbery that culminated with Trochez’s slaying.
At the same trial in November 2019, jurors found a fifth defendant, Robert Brumfield III, guilty of helping plan the deadly stickup. But they acquitted him of charges that he served as a getaway driver for the robbery.
Esteves and Brumfield, who are cousins, respectively face up to life imprisonment and 20 years behind bars. But neither has been sentenced as they await the outcome of the rest of the case.
According to federal prosecutors, Trochez was killed in a shootout with Ofomata, George and Johnson, who ambushed Trochez as he helped deliver $265,000 in cash to the Chase Bank branch at South Carrollton and South Claiborne avenues.
Federal prosecutors, who have jurisdiction over bank-related robberies, said Brumfield and Esteves helped plan the ambush and also aided the three gunmen’s escape from authorities.
DNA left on a screwdriver in one of two getaway cars that the stick-up crew used gave investigators a key break, allowing them to link George to the case. That lead, along with cellphone records, informants who heard confessions from the various men involved in Trochez’s killing and other evidence, helped prosecutors charge the defendants in November 2017.
A girlfriend of George, Jasmine Theophile, also awaits sentencing after she pleaded guilty in 2019 to trying to thwart the investigation into Trochez’s murder by destroying a cellphone. An employee of the bank, Thierry King, allegedly had been in touch with the robbers ahead of the holdup, but she has never been charged with a crime.
