California judge rules on effort to cut prison time for Marine veteran who dismembered girlfriend
A federal judge in San Diego has denied a retired Marine’s request to reduce his 26-year prison sentence for killing and dismembering his girlfriend and then hiding her body in the Panamanian jungle.
Brian Karl Brimager, who admitted to stabbing to death Yvonne Baldelli on the Panamian island where the couple was living, had sought to reduce his sentence by 30 months to 23.5 years based on a retroactive federal sentencing amendment addressing the criminal history of defendants.
If the amended rule had been in place during Brimager’s original 2016 sentencing, the bottom end of his sentencing guideline range would have been 30 months lower.
Though Brimager was sentenced to slightly longer than that low-end of the range, his attorneys wrote in a motion filed last year that their client was seeking a proportional 30-month sentence reduction.
At a hearing last week, Brimager said he didn’t dispute the “horrendous nature” of his crime. Baldelli’s family and friends pleaded with U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller not to reduce the prison sentence, arguing the 26-year term that Miller originally gave Brimager was already light enough, considering the heinousness of the crime.
Miller agreed, ruling Wednesday that he had essentially given Brimager credit in regards to his criminal history during the original sentencing.
“More importantly, however, the heinous and egregious circumstances of this murder and its aftermath combined with the emotional wreckage Defendant wrought by his actions justified 26 years of custody in 2016 as well as today,” Miller wrote in his order.
Defense attorney Devin Burstein said his client has been a “model inmate” who has helped other prisoners and shown he’s a changed man.
“We are disappointed that despite his exemplary behavior and the retroactive reduction in his sentencing range, the court did not lower his prison term,” Burstein said Thursday.
The retired Marine pleaded guilty in 2016 to second-degree foreign murder of a U.S. national — a rarely used charge that must be approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department.
Brimager, now 48, admitted stabbing Baldelli, 42, in the left side of her back with a knife and using a machete to dismember her body.
He stuffed her remains in a green military-style backpack and “tossed it in the Panamanian jungle like garbage,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Shane Harrigan told the judge earlier this month.
Brimager and Baldelli had moved in September 2011 to Isla Carenero off Panama for a fresh start after Brimager had left the Marines. Baldelli planned to start a bathing suit line, while Brimager planned to sing and play guitar in bars.
Witnesses later reported that Brimager appeared to be abusing Baldelli. Shortly after arriving on the tropical island, Brimager began communicating with a former partner with whom he shared a child and promising to rejoin them in San Diego County, prosecutors said.
Baldelli was last seen in November 2011. But over the next several months, according to his plea agreement, Brimager sent emails from Baldelli’s computer pretending to be her, telling her family and friends she had happily left for Costa Rica with another man.
Brimager, who had already returned to the San Diego area, even traveled to Costa Rica and withdrew money from her bank account while there to make it appear she was still alive, he admitted.
Baldelli’s family doubted Brimager’s story about Baldelli running off to Costa Rica and launched an investigation, eventually getting the FBI and Panamanian authorities involved. They traveled to Panama and organized search parties for her, coming up empty but convinced she was dead.
At last week’s hearing, several family members and friends recalled mucking through the Panamian jungle, both hoping and dreading that they would find her body.
While the search continued, Brimager married the mother of his child and settled in Vista. He was eventually arrested on charges of lying to federal investigators in June 2013, just days after his wife had given birth to their second child.
Months later, and about two years after Baldelli went missing, a farm worker clearing brush in a swampy part of the island uncovered her remains in the backpack. A charge of foreign murder of a U.S. national was then added to the charges Brimager faced.
Brimager’s sentence-reduction request was based on his criminal history — one of the factors that a judge must consider when imposing a sentence.
In 2016, he was initially placed in a slightly elevated criminal history category because he had committed the killing while still on probation for a 2009 charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. Under the newly amended rules, he would have been placed in the lowest criminal history category, resulting in the lower sentencing guideline range.
But Miller wrote that at the time of sentencing, he had treated Brimager as if he were already in the lowest criminal history category. The judge wrote that that was a large part of why he sentenced Brimager to 26 years, instead of the 30 years that prosecutors recommended.
Miller agreed with the defense that Brimager was eligible for a reduced sentence but ruled that he didn’t deserve one, writing that the slaying, dismembering and discarding of Baldelli’s “hacked remains” were “shockingly degrading and dehumanizing acts.”