The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s office secured a felony conviction and nearly three years in state prison for a copper wire thief that pled guilty to his charges.

Lorenzo Ortega Ochoa – also known as Lorenzo Ochoa Vital, 56 — will spend the next 32 months in a California prison after he pled guilty to stealing sections of AT&T copper wire from Acampo back in May.

Officers located 49 sections of 400-pair copper wire that had been cut and staged in a vineyard and waited for the men who had stolen it to return to pick it up — taking Ochoa Vital and Timoteo Aguilar into custody for the theft.

Thefts like the one he pled guilty to have become a focal point for not just law enforcement officers, but also prosecutors looking to put a stop to the potentially dangerous crime that has snarled up communications throughout the county and even interrupted 911 calling for some residents.

“These thefts can impact residents, causing them to be unable to make phone calls to 911, along with causing local businesses in the area affected to shut down for a period of time,” the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement announcing the sentence. “Mr. Ochoa Vital also admitted to a prior felony conviction for Arson in 2017.

“As a result of his guilty plea, he was sentences to 32 months in State Prison and was ordered to pay restitution for the damage caused to phone lines as a result of his theft.”

While copper theft in the Central Valley is nothing new — the methamphetamine epidemic sparked an underground economy — the thieves that are currently practicing it are now targeting very specific types of copper.

The 400-pair cables that were stolen by Ochoa Vital earlier this year are thick cables that contain 400 individual pairs of wires that are all joined together. When one of those communication lines gets cut, the responding technicians have to rejoin all of those pairs back together by hand – costing precious time and racking up bills that are ultimately passed back on to the subscribers to whatever service happened to be hit.

Multiple times over the last year, cables that provide telephone services to 911 dispatch centers in San Joaquin County were cut, resulting in 911 outages that left agencies and dispatchers scrambling. One municipality that was fielding calls for a different agency that had its service interrupted resorted to emailing the information to the calls to dispatchers so that information could then be relayed out to officers in the field.

And the heavy-handed enforcement — San Joaquin County Sheriff Pat Withrow and District Attorney Ron Freitas have both spoken out about the crimes and have worked with AT&T to prevent future thefts from occurring — is not something that is going away just because of a few busts.

“The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office will continue to prosecute cases of copper wire theft vigorously as these crimes cause widespread damage and disruption to our local communities,” the DA’s office said in a statement.

To contact Bulletin reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.