The man who struck and killed a woman near the Thomas Jefferson Community Center in the fall of 2022 will spend four years in prison.
Julio David Villazon received his 10-year sentence, of which six years were suspended, on Friday, according to Arlington County Circuit Court records. After his release, he will have five years of supervised probation. The court also suspended his driver’s license indefinitely.
Villazon blew through a stop sign in his truck and struck Viviana Oxlaj Pérez, 52, while she was walking toward a nearby 7-Eleven one August evening, family members told ARLnow after the crash. Oxlaj Pérez, a married mother of six, later died at the hospital.
Shortly after, Arlington County police arrested Villazon, who was 62 at the time.
He was charged in Arlington County Circuit Court with two felony involuntary manslaughter charges — one of which specified the crash involved alcohol — as well as a felony charge for failing to stop after an injury-causing crash and a misdemeanor charge for his second driving-while-intoxicated offense.
This time last year, a grand jury indicted him on all but the felony involuntary manslaughter charge attributing the crash to alcohol. In October, days before a 10-day jury trial was set to begin, Villazon pleaded guilty to the three remaining charges.
During his sentencing hearing last week, his DWI and failure to stop charges were dismissed. The alcohol-involved involuntary manslaughter charge, for which he was not indicted, is listed as “nolle prosequi,” meaning the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney opted not to prosecute this charge.
State guidelines say involuntary manslaughter charges come with either a prison term between 1-10 years or a fine of up to $2,500, or sometimes both. The felony failure-to-stop charge is also punishable as involuntary manslaughter.
As Villazon pled guilty to the top charge, dropping or keeping the others would not have changed his sentence, a local defense attorney told ARLnow on background.
Over the last decade, Arlington saw on average 154 alcohol-involved crashes per year. The number peaked at 203 in 2017 before falling to a 10-year low of 96 in 2020. Post-pandemic, the number of such crashes has since risen steadily, erasing the four-year decline.
Following the fatal hit-and-run, county officials focused on drunk-driving education. After another fatal crash occurred a few weeks later, however, the Arlington County Board pressed for faster progress on the investigation into Oxlaj Pérez’s death as well as other Vision Zero initiatives, including securing speeding cameras, which were still stuck in procurement as of last fall.
