LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A former sheriff’s deputy has reached a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office in the case alleging he was trafficking in prescription pills.
Eric Van Mendonca, 43, is expected to do a maximum of 180 days in jail as well as probation after agreeing to plead no contest to two counts of possession of hydrocodone for purpose of sale on Friday, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney Art Grothe.
Mendonca is set to return to Lake County Superior Court’s Department 3 for sentencing at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 2 by Judge Andrew Blum, Grothe said.
Until that time, Grothe said Mendonca has been released on his own recognizance with a search clause.
Mendonca was arrested at his Middletown home in June as the result of an FBI Safe Streets Task Force investigation, as Lake County News has reported.
It’s alleged that he had accumulated approximately 17,540 prescription pills between March 2009 and this past February, using multiple prescriptions and “doc shopping” to get them.
When Mendonca originally was charged in June, he was looking at a total of 16 felony counts for possession for sale, sale and offering to sell hydrocodone. Those charges were boiled down to two through negotiations between the District Attorney’s Office and Mendonca’s defense attorney, Roy Miller.
Mendonca formerly worked in law enforcement, serving as a Petaluma Police officer and later a Lake County Sheriff’s deputy, reportedly retiring from the sheriff’s office about a decade ago and since working as a butcher.
He was arrested last December and charged in federal court with conspiring with three other men to commit a home invasion robbery in Hidden Valley Lake for the purposes of stealing marijuana while dressed as law enforcement officers.
This past April, that federal case against him was dropped, with a federal judge noting the concern that the case against Mendonca was “built on innuendo and surmise rather than admissible evidence and that possibly he is an innocent man.”
One of his codefendants in that case, Jack Pollack, was sentenced to six years in the federal case and is facing a 24-year sentence in a separate local drug case, according to Grothe.
Pollack will return to court for sentencing Dec. 3, the day after Mendonca, Grothe said.
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