A federal judge on Friday sentenced a Salem man to two and a half years in prison for defrauding an elderly man out of $16,000. The sentence comes three months after Ross B. Sierzega, 34, pleaded guilty on July 11 in Portland U.S. District Court to bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. As part of Sierzega’s plea deal, federal prosecutors dismissed additional charges alleging that he stole at least three times from a Keizer mailbox. The Salem Police Department said in March that detectives found mail stolen from over 200 people during a search of his apartment.  U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez also sentenced him to three years of post-prison supervision. Sierzega used an 85-year-old man’s debit card 32 times to steal $16,000 from his Wells Fargo bank account, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Trisotto wrote in a sentencing memorandum. Prosecutors don’t know when the scheme began but said in the memorandum that Sierzega carried it out for over a month until February 2023. Sierzega withdrew $500 each time from a Salem ATM. The memorandum did not clarify whether Sierzega and the victim knew each other, only saying that Sierzega “obtained a stolen debit card.” His arrest in March was part of a longtime investigation into mail theft in the Salem area. Originally, prosecutors accused Sierzega of working with a person not identified in court records to steal from a community mailbox on North Rivercrest Drive in Keizer. In October 2023, a resident reported to the Keizer Police Department that someone had stolen mail from his mailbox. His neighbor’s surveillance video showed a person on a bicycle opening the set of mailboxes and stealing from them.  The resident two weeks later provided police with more video from his neighbor’s camera that showed a car pulling up to the mailbox, a man getting out of the front passenger side and easily using an “unauthorized access device key” to steal mail, according to Trisotto’s memorandum. A man, who federal prosecutors say is Sierzega, steals from a community mailbox on North Rivercrest Drive in Keizer on Oct. 19, 2023 (U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Oregon) The next day, the resident provided police with a third video of the same car pulling up to the mailbox and a man, who prosecutors said was Sierzega, stealing mail in the same fashion. Salem police arrested him five months later in March. Prosecutors sought a sentence four months longer than the judge imposed. They said in their filing that Sierzega had “a difficult upbringing.” He spent much of his childhood bouncing between his parents and later lived with one due to the other’s complications with paranoid schizophrenia and methamphetamine use.  Sierzega also had mental health issues since he was a boy and was placed on psychotropic medications until his mid teens. He started using meth when he was 18 and heroin when he was 21. Before his recent arrest, he was using crack cocaine every other day and methamphetamine and fentanyl daily, according to prosecutors. Sierzega has previous convictions in state court dating back to 2012, including burglary and theft. He also has pending charges of heroin possession, two counts of theft and giving false information to a peace officer in Marion County Circuit Court, as well as failure to appear on a criminal citation and an additional theft charge in Linn County Circuit Court. RELATED COVERAGE: Police raiding suspect’s home seized mail stolen from over 200 people Salem man accused of stealing enormous amount of mail faces federal charges Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053. A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE. The post Salem man gets 2.5 years for defrauding elderly man, mail theft charge dropped appeared first on Salem Reporter.