A truck driver who already was in jail for setting Swift trailers on fire in California has been sentenced to a decade in jail for separate arson attacks on the company’s trailers in Arizona, but caught some breaks in his punishment.
Viorel Pricop, 67, was convicted in August of three counts of arson in U.S. Federal District
Court for Arizona after an eight-day trial, according to a statement on the sentencing released Monday by U.S. Attorney Timothy Courchaine.
“This defendant left a nation-wide path of destruction that threatened lives, property, and critical infrastructure,” Courchaine said in announcing the sentencing.
The three counts Pricop was convicted of at trial each received a sentence of 10 years plus one month, to be served concurrently.
Years tacked on to earlier sentence
But only part of the Arizona sentence will be served by Pricop concurrent to his California incarceration. Six years of it will be served consecutively.
Each of the six counts Pricop was found guilty of in California came with a ten-year sentence. The six are being served concurrently.
The sentencing memo submitted by the federal prosecutors in Arizona was unsparing in its portrayal of Prokip, who never worked for Swift or its parent, Knight Swift (NYSE: KNX).
“Between October of 2021 and September of 2022, Mr. Pricop engaged in a calculated scheme of revenge on Knight-Swift Transportation,” the sentencing memo said.
Beef goes back to another case
Pricop had targeted Swift, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office, because of the company’s cooperation with an earlier investigation that led to Prikop being convicted in 2018 of tax-related charges and the transportation of stolen goods. He served about 26 months for that offense. A period of supervised release ended in June 2019.
“He set 19 trailer fires across five states, in locations intentionally chosen for their remoteness,” the sentencing memo said. “These fires endangered the lives of those sleeping in the vehicles and those of other truckers who merely happened to be in the same areas. The specific fires in this case were clearly traumatic events that still loom large in the mind of the truck drivers involved.”
Prikop’s incendiary spree stretched from California to Alabama, the U.S. Attorney said, with most of them occurring in the interstate 10 and interstate 40 corridors.
Pricop, born in Romania, “is not sorry for what he did and given the chance he would do it again, with no apparent limit on his actions other than an internal determination that whoever wronged him in the past was appropriately punished,” the sentencing memo said “He is a dangerous, violent criminal who remains unconcerned with the requirement that he live within the law.”
In her sentencing memo, Prikop attorney Stephanie Bond had asked that the sentences for the Arizona convictions be served concurrently to California. She was 50% successful in that request.
“Mr. Pricop is 67 years old and suffers from serious, debilitating medical conditions,” she wrote in her sentencing memo. “When released on the California case, he will be approximately 76, depending on this Court’s sentence. Given his age and declining health, additional incarceration provides no meaningful increase in deterrence or public safety. Those goals are fully met by imposing a concurrent sentence consistent with the California judgment.”
Bond did receive what she asked for in terms of duration. “The California Court imposed a 121 month sentence for six fires,” she wrote. “A harsher sentence here for three fires, or a structure that results in more total time in custody, would create unwarranted disparity rather than prevent it.”
The U.S. Attorney had asked for 120 months for each count, running concurrently, which is what was handed down by Judge John Hinderaker. But the prosecutor also asked that six years of that sentence be served consecutive to the California sentence; Judge Hinderaker made five of them consecutive.
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