A Merrifield man who evaded arrest for eight years will spend the next decade in federal prison in connection to drug charges.
Otis Chevalier, 46, was sentenced last Thursday (April 10) to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty last year to both the distribution of and the conspiracy to distribute the drug phencyclidine — otherwise known as PCP, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
From 2015 to 2017, Chevalier had shipped PCP through the mail twice to residences belong to the mothers of his children in Chantilly. He would then take the substance to a Maryland storage unit, where he stored and repackaged it for redistribution, federal prosecutors said.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, investigators with the U.S. Postal Service received a report in June 2015 of a leaking package shipped to Alexandria that turned out to have PCP. Inspectors also found the substance in a parcel seized in December 2015:
On June 6, 2015, U.S. Postal Inspectors responded to a report of a leaking parcel shipped from California to an apartment in Alexandria. The parcel contained multiple Mason-style jars containing approximately two gallons of PCP. On Dec. 11, 2015, Chevalier shipped three packages from California to Virginia and Maryland. On Dec. 18, 2015, U.S. Postal Inspectors seized one of the packages, which had been mailed to an address in Chantilly. The parcel contained approximately 6.5 kilograms of a mixture containing PCP.
A search of Chevalier’s Mosaic District apartment the following year uncovered a variety of drug paraphernalia, including items commonly used in the preparation and packing of PCP, a U.S. postal inspector said in court documents.
A federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant for Chevalier on Jan. 5, 2017, but after his attorney alerted him to the warrant, Chevalier fled to avoid prosecution, evading law enforcement under an alias, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
He was ultimately taken into custody in Reston last August, though court documents don’t reveal any details about how he was found.
Chevalier, who pleaded guilty to the two charges back in October, had faced a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, according to federal statute.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release, Chevalier had a previous felony drug conviction for a PCP case where he “was found to have caused a residential explosion in Bowie, Maryland.”
