Former Employee Sentenced to Five-Year Prison Term
For Burglaries at the Veterans Administration Hospital
– Defendant Admits Committing Series of Burglaries at the Facility -

     WASHINGTON - Anthony Maye, 55, has been sentenced to five years in prison on charges stemming from two burglaries at his former place of employment, the Veterans Administration Hospital in Northwest Washington, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. announced.

     Maye, of Washington D.C., pled guilty in August 2011 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to two counts of second-degree burglary. He was sentenced October 28, 2011 by the Honorable Michael Ryan. Judge Ryan ordered that Maye participate in vocational training, drug testing and treatment, and psychological counseling. Upon completion of his prison term, Maye will be placed on supervised release.

     According to the government’s evidence, Maye committed two burglaries in May 2011 at the hospital, at 50 Irving Street NW. Maye had worked as a janitor there since March 2009.

     On May 21, 2011 Maye entered the hospital, after calling in sick for his work shift, and was caught on surveillance videotape spray-painting a video surveillance camera. Then again on May 23, 2011, videotaped footage showed Maye entering a hospital ward with a backpack and spray-painting a video surveillance camera. This time, the wet paint dripped from the camera lens, and the videotape captured images of Maye entering and exiting several rooms that were burglarized. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Police revealed that several safes were pried open in the rooms Maye was seen entering and exiting, and their contents were stolen between May 21 and May 23, 2011. Work records showed that Maye was the only janitorial employee assigned to work in the burglarized areas on these specific dates.

     Maye’s supervisors positively identified him on the video surveillance footage. Moreover, Veterans Affairs police observed that, on May 24, 2011 Maye was still wearing the same bandage on his hand that he was seen wearing in the video surveillance tape.

     When confronted about the videotaped footage, Maye admitted that he was the person in both video surveillance tapes captured on May 21 and May 23, 2011. Veterans Affairs police subsequently executed a search warrant on Maye’s car and found burglary tools, a suspiciously large quantity of Metro fare cards, and Metro fare tokens.

     Ultimately, Maye admitted that he committed the burglaries on the two dates.

     In addition, Maye admitted that he had committed burglaries at the hospital on seven other occasions between April 2010 and May 2011, while employed at the facility.

     In announcing the sentence, U.S. Attorney Machen commended Department of Veterans Affairs Police Officer Gregory Straub, who led the investigation, as well as Special Agents Christos Rigakos and James O’Neill of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General, and Veterans Affairs Police Officers Anthony Green, Tommie Boozer, William Nesbitt, Bero Patrick, and Luis Rodriguez-Soto. He also praised the work of Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Officers Travis Weston, Justin Rogers, David Wildey, Sarah Hoffman, Jonathan Jordan, John Wright, Kevin Harding, Brian Peake, and Javon Voglezon, and MPD Sgts. Christopher Petz and Jeffrey Labofish.

     Finally, U.S. Attorney Machen expressed his appreciation to paralegal Kalisha Johnson-Clark, who prepared the case for indictment, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Eaton, who conducted the pre-indictment investigation and prosecuted the case.

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