Biography
Diego Vargas, of Aurora, Illinois, was federally prosecuted for actions on two consecutive nights of the 2020 George Floyd uprising in the Chicago suburbs. On the evening of May 31, 2020 he joined others attempting to open an ATM at a First Midwest Bank branch in downtown Aurora — the original complaint says he helped pull on the machine, and his later plea agreement admitted he also struck it with a baseball bat and used a metal street-sign pole to try to pry it open. The machine held more than fifty thousand dollars; no money was obtained. The following night, June 1, he broke a window of the closed Egg Harbor Cafe in Naperville with a street-sign pole and threw a lit explosive device inside, causing two explosions and no injuries.
He was first arrested on July 1, 2020 with Fermin Ocampo-Tellez and Michael Gomez on the ATM conspiracy complaint; public records do not establish how long he remained in custody after that first arrest. A separate federal indictment for the restaurant explosion followed, and he was arrested again on October 7, 2020, appearing the next day by telephone from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, where he was ordered detained and remained through sentencing. He pleaded guilty on June 10, 2021 to a single count of maliciously attempting to damage or destroy a building by an explosive device — the ATM incident was admitted as relevant conduct, not separately convicted — and on March 3, 2022 Judge Elaine E. Bucklo imposed the mandatory-minimum sixty months. He served at FCI Allenwood Medium and then FCI Schuylkill under federal register number 55070-424, and a BOP-derived inmate index reports his release on February 4, 2025 — about four years, three months and twenty-eight days of continuous custody from the October 2020 arrest. That date is high confidence but pending direct Bureau of Prisons confirmation.
