No doubt you read about the Maui man who was advised by a judge to avoid Pepsi while on probation for car theft.
Everybody read about it. The Maui News story was picked up by newspapers across the country, from the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle to smaller papers with less familiar names: Edwardsville Intelligencer, Mankato Free Press, the Delta Optimist. Everybody loves an oddball story.
Turns out it wasn’t a judicial order, more like a suggestion.
The Associated Press sent out a correction to the story yesterday, though it had already spread across the country like a meme and then quickly faded as some new oddball fascination rose up and started trending.
In a nutshell, the defendant told police he had borrowed the car from a relative to drive to the store to buy Pepsi, his favorite soda. He later pleaded no contest to charges of unauthorized control of a propelled vehicle and driving without a license.
But while Maui Judge Rhonda Loo did not order the defendant to avoid Pepsi as a condition of his probation, rather merely suggested he avoid Pepsi if it leads him to do something like jack a car, she does have a track record of quotable decisions from the bench.
In October 2017 Loo sentenced a man who violated an order for protection to write 144 compliments about his ex-girlfriend, one for every horrible text message he had sent her when he wasn’t supposed to be contacting her. “For every nasty thing you said about her, you’re going to say a nice thing,” Loo told the defendant in a quote that was picked up in news stories. Then the judge took it one step further. “No repeating words.”
In March of last year, Loo told a defendant with the last name of Wright to change his ways or he’d have to change his name to Wrong. Loo once sentenced a man with multiple DUI convictions to prison plus a lifetime ban on driving.
The Pepsi story sounds like it started with a guy coming up with a implausible excuse (after all, the gas station where the car theft took place sells Pepsi) and a judge tired of hearing every big fat whopper under the sun. In addition to the no-Pepsi suggestion, Christopher Montilliano Jr. was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and pay a $100 fine.
One important detail that slipped by in the retelling of this tale was that the stolen car in question was a 1990 Honda Accord. Montilliano, the 21-year-old Maui man who had his name and his alleged cola preference repeated all across English-language newspapers this weekend, spent seven days in jail following his arrest, and then another three months in custody because he didn’t show up to court for sentencing. That’s a lot of time for a 29-year-old Honda Accord boosted for, supposedly, a Pepsi run to Foodland. Hopefully, he’ll take the judge’s suggestion.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
Correction: Christopher Montilliano Jr was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. An earlier version of this story had an incorrect number of hours.
