An East Palo Alto man was sentenced in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday to seven years and three months in prison for seeking to hire someone to murder a woman who accused him of sexual harassment.
Ulices Cazarez, 39, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer.
He pleaded guilty before Breyer in December to one count of using an interstate commerce facility – namely, cellphone text messages and calls – in the commission of murder for hire.
Cazarez was formerly a manager in a janitorial company and the supervisor of the woman who accused him of sexually harassing her. She also alleged he threatened to cause her to lose her job if she did not agree to accept the harassment and go out with him.
The woman, a single mother who spoke limited English, filed a civil sexual harassment lawsuit against him in the state court system in May 2015.
Within two weeks of receiving a copy of the lawsuit, Cazarez began sending texts to an acquaintance to ask for help in hiring someone to murder the accuser, according to a prosecution filing.
The acquaintance was a confidential informant who arranged a meeting between Cazarez and an undercover agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who posed as a hit man.
Cazarez and the undercover agent met in the parking lot of the Stonestown Galleria shopping mall in San Francisco on June 12, 2015, and discussed a murder price of $7,000 or $8,000, prosecutors said.
In the next few days, Cazarez said in text messages to his acquaintance that he feared the hit man was a law enforcement agent and said he was willing to pay up to $21,000 to have a different person carry out the killing, according to prosecutors.
Cazarez was arrested on June 25, 2015.
The harassment victim submitted a victim impact statement to the court for the sentencing, saying that she was traumatized by the harassment and murder-for-hire plan and that she and her two children rarely leave their house and live in fear.
Defense attorneys contended in a sentencing brief that Cazarez panicked when he received the civil lawsuit, did not know how to defend himself, “fell apart mentally,” and “began a rapid downward spiral into drugs and cognitive impairment.”
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I hope that with this sentence the victim and her family will begin to feel safe again. What terror they have been through.