Loredo Pleads; Sentenced To 16 Years

August 04, 2005

HUNTSVILLE — Saying she wished the family of her husband was in court so that she could apologize to them, Vanessa Loredo pled guilty here shortly after noon on Friday to facilitation of second degree murder in the July 2003 shooting death of Armando Loredo.

Loredo’s plea came two days after a jury found her father, Charles Harvey, guilty of first degree murder.

Following her guilty plea, Criminal Court Judge E. Shayne Sexton sentenced Loredo to 16 years in prison. Loredo could have served as little as eight years or as many as 30. Judge Sexton said that Loredo had provided “substantial assistance to the killing of Armando Loredo by Charles Harvey.”

Judge Sexton said that Loredo will be credited for time served while awaiting trial, approximately two years.

Loredo thanked the court for “being as lenient as they can be,” a point that was refuted by Judge Sexton, who said the court wasn’t being lenient.

Loredo was married to Armando Loredo in April 2000, according to her testimony in her father’s murder trial two days earlier. The two had had a rocky relationship throughout their marriage, something she claimed was due to her husband’s abusiveness.

After having no contact with her father, Charles Harvey, from the time her parents divorced when she was 12 years old, according to Harvey’s testimony in his trial, she renewed her relationship with her father on Father’s Day 2003, when her brother — the late Eric Harness — called her to tell her that their father “seem’s like he has changed.”

Just over one month later, Armando Loredo’s body was discovered submerged in New River, shot execution-style in the back of the head, a crime that Vanessa Loredo admitted to helping her father carry out. In testimony in the earlier trial, she had said that she called Harvey on June 7, 2003, to tell him that she was “tired” of her husband’s alleged abusiveness.

The possibility of a plea agreement between the state and Vanessa Loredo was first alluded to at a March 2004 hearing, when District Attorney General William Paul Phillips told Judge Sexton that the state had “reached an agreement” with Loredo and that “her matter would be taken care of” after Harvey’s trial.

Four months later, in July 2004, the state was close to a plea agreement with Harvey — close enough that both parties were prepared to take the matter before Judge Sexton — before it apparently fell through at the last moment. At that hearing, Phillips told Judge Sexton that “attorneys have been working on the assumption of a plea agreement (but) it appears today that we do not have an agreement.”

Harvey was represented at that time by defense attorney Tom Barclay, who has since joined the district attorney’s office as a prosecutor.

news@ihoneida.com

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