EL DORADO COUNTY, Calif — A Placerville dad found guilty of killing his 11-year-old son Roman Lopez was sentenced Thursday to 15 years-to-life in prison, according to the El Dorado County District Attorney's Office.
Jordan Piper is already in prison serving a 15-year sentence for unrelated charges of sexual exploitation of a child.
“Justice has been served for Roman,” said El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson. “Both his father and stepmother are now being held accountable for their incomprehensible cruelty, abuse and death of their child and will spend a very long time behind bars.”
Roman's stepmother Lindsay Piper was also convicted of 2nd degree murder and sentenced to 15 years-to-life in prison.
DEATH OF ROMAN LOPEZ
According to investigators, Roman, his biological father Jordan, stepmother Lindsay and seven other children had recently moved to Placerville around the time of his death.
The case was initially investigated as a suspicious death. Police didn’t find anything in their first search of the home, but they found Roman’s body inside a storage bin in the basement during a second search.
An autopsy found no signs of obvious trauma, though it showed Roman was severely malnourished and dehydrated when he died.
Jordan and Lindsay were arrested in Feb. 2021 and charged with child abuse, poisoning and torture.
It wasn’t until Oct. 2021 that the pair were charged with Roman’s murder, and it wasn’t until May 2022 that Lindsay flipped her plea on a charge of second-degree murder from ‘not guilty’ to ‘no contest.’ She was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
In Oct. 2023, Piper was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual exploitation of a girl, which is unrelated to Lopez’s death but was discovered during the investigation into it.
In that case, Piper made 30 recordings of a minor in Groveland in 2019 and made hundreds of screenshots from the recordings showing the girl’s genitals and pubic area.
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