Nicholas Lopez-Juarez, age 28, billed out of St. James, then St. Peter, then Melrose, is our Minnesota Man of the week. A Guatemalan national, Lopez has been charged with one federal felony count of illegal re-entry of a previously deported alien.
Prosecutors document an entry into America by Lopez in 2012. In 2017, he recorded a domestic assault conviction in Washington State.
He was not deported until 2019. Since his 2019 return to the U.S. and Minnesota, Lopez has racked up three DWI’s, each with a higher blood alcohol content than the last. In between, he racked up two unrelated cases where he gave a false name to law enforcement. Mr. Lopez does not appear to speak English.
To keep it all straight, I put together this spreadsheet.
A commonality of his three DWI arrests is that none came via a traffic stop. All three began with panicked calls from the general public, as Lopez careened about the countryside. Reading the police reports, it was a minor miracle that these incidents didn’t end in more carnage.
One difference between the first and third DWI was his preference shifting from Dos Equis to Corona Extra.
Across the five Minnesota incidents, Lopez still owes more than $2,000 in unpaid court fines, even after $1,000 in forfeited bail money had been applied to past-due charges.
Other than time served while awaiting judicial hearings, Lopez has not been sentenced to any jail time, all sentences were stayed. After his latest re-sentencing (after probation violation(s)) on August 13, Lopez was taken into ICE custody. He was transferred to the U.S. Marshals on September 4 and is now being held in the Sherburne County jail.
No date has been set yet for his next federal court appearance, but a return to Guatemala should be in his nearish future.
