Left: Jordan Piper; Right: Roman Lopez. (El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office)
A California man who, along with his wife, murdered their 11-year-old son, secreted away the child’s body and then reported him missing, will spend at least a decade-and-a-half in prison.
On Thursday, Jordan Thomas Piper, 38, was sentenced by an El Dorado County judge to a term of 15 years to life in prison for the murder of Roman Anthony Lopez, whose corpse was discovered hidden in a storage bin in the family’s basement on Jan. 11, 2020.
In late October 2023, Jordan Piper admitted to his part in Roman’s death, taking a plea deal for one count of murder in the second degree.
At first, the boy’s father and adoptive mother, Lindsay Piper, 40, insisted they were innocent and pleaded not guilty to various crimes connected to Lopez’s death. Their facades didn’t last long.
In February 2021, the couple was charged with torture and child abuse over Lopez’s death. Jordan Piper was accused of willfully failing to provide food and water; Lindsay Piper was accused of poisoning the boy. In October 2021, they were charged with murder.
An autopsy would eventually show that Lopez had been severely malnourished and dehydrated until he died. He weighed 42 pounds at the time of his death. Medical records from two years before he died, relatively healthier times, showed that he weighed 61 pounds. Those 2018 records catalog the last time he ever saw a doctor.
In addition to the intentional starvation regime, Lopez was regularly beaten and restrained to his bed at night using zip ties.
The Pipers first pleaded absolute ignorance to the press.
“We have no idea what happened, where they found him, what the autopsy report said, if that’s even done, any suspects, nothing,” Jordan Piper told The Sacramento Bee in an exclusive interview that ran on Feb. 4, 2021. “We have nothing.”
Seeking some plausible reason the boy was found dead in their basement just hours after he was reported missing, the Pipers gave the newspaper a story about a boy who loved to hide all over.
The next day, the couple were initially charged.
“Lindsay Marie Piper willfully and unlawfully mingled a poison and harmful substance with food, drink, medicine and pharmaceutical product,” the stepmother’s criminal complaint alleged.
In May 2022, Lindsay Piper changed her “not guilty” plea to “no contest” on one charge of murder in the second degree. She was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in July 2022.
Judge Vicki Ashworth upbraided the defendant just before sentencing, saying she “didn’t deserve to be [Roman’s] stepmother, quite frankly” and “the court can think of no more evil person than that,” in comments reported by Sacramento CBS affiliate KOVR.
Jordan Piper’s plea was changed from not guilty to guilty. Appearing in the El Dorado County Superior Court, he was convicted the same day, according to the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office. He was originally set to be sentenced last November.
Problems with a Zoom call precluded that original sentencing date to go forward, according to Sacramento NBC affiliate KCRA.
Reprising her chiding tone for the child’s father, Ashworth said it was Jordan Piper’s job to fashion a child into a man, the Bee reported.
“You absolutely utterly and completely not only failed in that respect, but it was at your hands that he was abused to the point where he had bruises on his wrist from being zip-tied to his bed,” the judge said. “He was zip-tied at times in the closet, was given an over amount of sodium or salt in his diet, forced to wear diapers at the age of 11 years old.”
Roman Lopez’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, died in 2021, after a long custody battle for the boy that was waged across several states — but ultimately to no good end. In a witness impact statement, one of Lopez’s friends alleged that Jordan Piper had abused the child for years before he died.
“It wasn’t as if he was a human being to yourself and Ms. Piper but rather an object and nothing more,” Ashworth told the condemned man on Thursday. “An inconvenience, if you will.”
In the Golden State, the maximum sentence for a conviction on a second-degree murder charge is 15 years to life in prison.
“It was a strategic decision,” Deputy District Attorney Jay Linden said after the hearing, in comments reported by KCRA. “You balance the things. You want to get closure. You want certainty. You want justice.”
The change of plea came one day after Jordan Piper was sentenced to spend 15 years behind bars in a federal child sexual exploitation case for making “surreptitious recordings” of a girl under 18. He was charged by federal prosecutors for that offense in June 2022.
The two cases are unrelated, but the child sexual exploitation investigation was a product of the murder investigation.
While investigating Lopez’s murder, the Placerville Police Department seized various digital devices from the Piper household. They discovered child sexual abuse materials produced between October 2019 and January 2020 in Tuolumne and El Dorado counties.
“Approximately 433 nude images of Minor Victim 1 were found on Jordan Piper’s cell phone in the cache and screenshots section of the phone, as well as cache folders and screenshot folders in a secure folder on the phone,” federal agents wrote in a criminal complaint. “Many of those images created by Jordan Piper were focused shots of Minor Victim 1’s genitals or pubic area. In addition, the video camera was placed in a manner to maximize the chances of recording the genitals of Minor Victim 1 and other users of the bathroom.”
Per the terms of his plea agreement, Jordan Piper’s murder sentence will be served concurrently with his sex crime sentence.
“I hope when the defendant goes to sleep every night he hears echoes of Roman screaming at the top of his lungs, in fear, in hurt, and in terrified wails much like he did the night before his death,” Erin Rice, a friend of Roman’s mother, said at the hearing, CBS News reported.
“He’s a monster. He’s manipulative, and he is selfish,” Rice said in comments reported by the Bee. “He’s a shell of a man with no moral compass or value. He knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway for years and did nothing to stop it.”
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