She was a “good customer” of her supplier, spending between as much as $27,000 on the pills in 2022 alone, prosecutors said.
She often coordinated the shipments and payments with her Indian supplier via WhatsApp and “pumped tens of thousands of dollars over the years into the coffers of these unscrupulous networks,” Tartakovsky wrote.
In court Tuesday, Tartakovsky noted that there are many people in America illicitly ordering drugs off the internet because of their addictions, and that the federal government doesn’t typically charge “pure users” with crimes. But Segovia went a step further, he said.
“She became a sort of auxiliary of this Indian network. She carried water for them,” Tartakovsky said. “She did things for their benefit, like moving pills for them. And this is not some peripheral thing. This is the core of how these schemes work. They rely on Americans to re-ship for them.”
Segovia was not profiting off these actions, he said, but was instead “spending this massive fraction of her income” and “essentially almost bankrupting herself” to feed her addiction.
Segovia was arrested in March 2023, initially on one count of illegally importing a form of fentanyl. Prosecutors, however, later removed the fentanyl charge after admitting that a lab test of the contents of one of the packages sent to her had produced a false positive result. The charge was subsequently changed to the illegal importation of tapentadol.
Expressing remorse
In August 2024, Segovia, who had maintained her innocence until that point, indicated to the court she’d be willing to accept responsibility for her crime.
In a Dec. 18 personal written statement asking the judge for leniency, Segovia expressed remorse for her actions, saying she “would do anything to take it all back,” and noted that she is heavily involved in the lives of her grandchildren and is a caretaker for her 81-year-old husband, who is ill.
“I never realized the magnitude of what I had done until a gun was pointed at me. I have never been in trouble with the law. This was something I had only seen in movies. It was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me,” she wrote.
She said she has also stopped taking pills since her arrest and has passed 45 random drug tests while undergoing counseling and treatment.
“I have this nice little life and it was all blown up in front of me,” Segovia said in court on Tuesday. “And being sober made me know how horrendous my conduct was. And I’ve never done anything but be for the law, and I’m really sorry.”
Several other people, including her daughter, friends, neighbor and current and former San José police officers, wrote to the judge on her behalf, attesting that Segovia is a good person, loving family member and a reliable colleague who cares deeply for others.
Segovia was fired from her role as executive director of the police union shortly after her arrest in 2003. The union denied any involvement or knowledge of her actions.
Nevertheless, the arrest sparked outrage among local elected officials, police critics and activists, prompting protests outside San José City Hall, with demonstrators calling for further investigations and demanding city leaders to stop taking donations from the powerful police union.
The police union hired a private investigator to look into whether Segovia’s actions were connected to her work, releasing the results after her conviction.
The investigator concluded there was “no evidence whatsoever that any POA representative had any involvement, knowledge, or suspicions regarding Segovia’s alleged criminal activities” and that all the facts indicate she acted alone.
Prosecutors agreed with that assessment but also criticized the union for interfering in the federal investigation following Segovia’s arrest.
“The SJPOA announced publicly after the search of Segovia’s office that it wished to cooperate with this investigation. Yet counsel for the SJPOA engaged in stonewalling, even threatening to ‘seek judicial intervention’ to stop the prosecution from reviewing Segovia’s SJPOA email contents, though the SJPOA never followed through on its threat,” Tartakovsky wrote in the court memo.
In the same week, the union walled off public access to major portions of its website, including pages that list its board members and staff — a change that its leadership said was aimed at protecting them.
‘Life upended’
While Segovia was a civilian employee for her entire 20-year career with the police union, Tartakovsky wrote that “she held a position that should have instilled her with firmer respect for the law and for her obligation to be truthful with law enforcement.”
And though she has since admitted her conduct was wrong and accepted responsibility for it, Tartakovsky noted that she initially lied to federal investigators, attempting to pin everything on her housekeeper, a move he called “reprehensible.”
“This was not just the normal blundering dissimulation blurted out when a target is first surprised and confronted by law enforcement,” Tartakovsky wrote. After being questioned by investigators, he said “Segovia took six weeks to ponder her predicament, concocted a story” in an unsuccessful attempt to dupe investigators.
Gasner, Segovia’s attorney, said in his memo to the court that Segovia initially denied her
crime “in a desperate attempt to preserve the secret of her addiction as the barrier between her normal and illicit life broke down.”
Prosecutors ultimately concluded that Segovia’s actions were “not the behavior of a ‘mastermind,’ but a scared, confused, and addicted woman who saw the walls collapsing around her,” Tartakovsky wrote.
Actions of an ‘addict,’ not a ‘dealer’
Judge Lee said Tuesday she had weighed all the facts of the case, and agreed Segovia’s actions appeared to be “those of an addict and not a dealer,” and she also commended Segovia on her sobriety.
“A conviction here is warranted. There was deception at the beginning of the investigation. There was an abuse of power in a law enforcement-adjacent position,” Lee said. “Ms Segovia held a position that should have instilled in her a firmer respect for law enforcement and a firmer respect for being truthful at the beginning of the investigation.”
In his memo, Tartakovsky said Segovia, in losing her job and having her life upended by the criminal proceedings, has paid a steep price for her actions, and he credited her for overcoming her addiction.