Jon Vincent, 45, was sentenced to two years of federal prison for Social Security fraud and identity theft on Thursday in Philadelphia
A fugitive on the lam from a Texas prison sentence has been sentenced to jail after stealing the identity of a deceased baby and living under the false name for 20 years.
Jon Vincent, 45, was sentenced to two years of federal prison on charges of Social Security fraud and identity theft on Thursday in Philadelphia, after living as Nathan Thomas Laskowski for two decades.
Since 1996, when Vincent absconded from parole under threat of returning to jail, he has married twice, had twin girls, and had settled in the Philadelphia suburbs where he worked as a nurse’s aide.
Handing down the sentence, US District Judge Jan E. DuBois observed that the case was ‘the stuff of which short stories – even perhaps longer stories – are written,’ the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The strange saga of Jon Vincent’s double lives began in 1991, when he was convicted of indecency with a child and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Further details of the case were not immediately available, but the Texas law covers both molestation and indecent exposure with a child younger than 17 years.
Vincent was paroled halfway through his sentence, and was sent to live in a halfway house.
‘I went somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go to which they wanted to violate may parole so I ran,’ Vincent wrote in a signed confession.
‘I was told by a step dad of mine about how to change one identity so I did it and it worked.’
Vincent is seen in a 1991 booking photo from his arrest in Texas
Vincent got his new identity from the gravestone of Nathan Laskowski, who died just two months old in 1972 and is buried at Greenwood Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Texas.
Chillingly, he called the parents of the deceased baby under some pretense, and gathered enough information to get a replacement birth certificate and Social Security card under the stolen name.
On Thursday, the parents, Margaret and Thomas Laskowski, made the trip from Texas to appear at Vincent’s sentencing hearing.
‘To claim that this crime tore open a wound long healed would most certainly be a lie, because we will always miss our son,’ Margaret Laskoski said.
‘That that stranger actually lingered over our child’s grave – over our very sacred place – leaves an … unfathomable ache.’
‘That that stranger actually lingered over our child’s grave – over our very sacred place – leaves an … unfathomable ache.’
Vincent, now a family man who has turned to religion in the Seventh-Day Adventist church in recent years, was remorseful and repentant in court.
‘As a father now, I understand how precious kids are,’ he said. ‘When I did this, I didn’t have a clue. I never meant to harm anyone.’
His crimes came to light by chance, when a relative of the Laskowskis noticed that ‘Nathan Laskowski’ appeared on Ancestry.com as married with children, despite having died as an infant.
Thomas Laskowski, the father of baby Nathan, wondered about the other unintended victims of Vincent’s crime: ‘What will happen to all the wives and children who now have our last name?’
After Vincent completes his federal sentence for identity theft, he will be returned to Texas to finish the sentence he absconded from.