SAN JOSE — A Bay Area man was sentenced to 17 months in prison for plotting with other gang members to rip off a Union City drug house in 2018, court records show.
Caleb Eller allegedly scoped out the target house, theorizing they would get at least “a brick” of cocaine from the home and that the brothers who ran it, who’d been robbed before, wouldn’t put up a fight. He suggested his cohorts “boot the door down and get it from them,” prosecutors said in court filings.
Eller was one of dozens of alleged Norteño or Nuestra Familia affiliates charged in 2021 as part of a massive racketeering prosecution aimed at taking down the structure of Norteño gangs throughout California. Since his arrest and pretrial release, he was turning his life around, starting an online business, participating in regular food distribution services for folks in-need, and engaging in youth counseling, his attorney wrote in court filings.
Then Eller was arrested in a 2020 home invasion robbery in Southern California, disrupting his rehabilitation.
“He was well into the process of leading a law abiding life and putting his criminal past behind him,” his attorney wrote in court filings.
Both prosecutors and the defense agreed on a 24-month sentence, but Eller’s lawyer argued that he should get seven months credit for time served behind bars after his arrest in the 2020 robbery. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted his time credit and ordered his sentence to run concurrently to whatever he may receive in the Southern California case.