A decade after pleading guilty to killing his ex-lover in the US, a fugitive Indian-American medical billing specialist has started serving his 23-year prison term in a Texas jail after being extradited from India.
Amit Livingston, 47, fled to India in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to killing his 31-year-old former lover Hermila Hernandez in 2005.
Hernandez, a married mother of three children, was shot in the back of the head and her body was left on a South Padre Island in Texas after she reportedly told Livingston she wanted to end their relationship, KGBT-TV reported.
After announcing the sentence for 23 years in 2007, Judge Abel Limas had strangely allowed Livingston 60 days to put his affairs in order before reporting to prison, the report said.
When Livingston's date for reporting to prison arrived, he disappeared.
Limas and Armando Villalobos, the district attorney at the time, were both later convicted in a bribery conspiracy and the scheme that allowed Livingston to escape, the report said.
Livingston was arrested in India in 2014 and jailed in Hyderabad before being extradited to the US, under the terms of a 1997 India-US extradition treaty.
On Monday, Diplomatic Security Service agents boarded a flight with Livingston out of India. Upon arriving at Newark International Airport in New Jersey, they handed him over to US Marshals, who escorted him to Texas where he will serve his 23-year prison term.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz made finding Livingston and extraditing him to the United States a priority since he took office in January 2013, Brownsville Herald reported.
The Livingston case and subsequent monetary settlements were key in the Cameron County corruption cases of the past few years that led to the conviction of high-ranking public officials, including Limas and Villalobos, it said.
