A San Antonio man who was freed from life in prison by President Barack Obama is back behind bars, accused of crashing his car into another vehicle while fleeing from officers after a drug deal Thursday.

Robert M. Gill, 68, whose life sentence for cocaine and heroin distribution conspiracy was commuted by Obama in 2015, was profiled last year in the San Antonio Express-News about his readjustment to life on the outside.

Jailed from the time of his arrest in 1990, Gill earned a legal education inside prison libraries and successfully petitioned the then-president for a second chance after his court appeals were exhausted.

He was taken to federal court Friday, and U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad ordered him held without bail pending a hearing Feb. 16. Gill is charged with possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine. Five hundred grams is a little more than 1 pound.

He again faces a potential sentence with a mandatory minimum, five years, and he could get up to 40.

RELATED: Read past coverage about Robert Gill here.

Gill became one of about 1,700 federal inmates whose sentences Obama commuted as part of a broader campaign to give relief to nonviolent offenders serving long prison terms that dated to a frenzied period in the nation’s war on drugs. In the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of offenders were punished under mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for federal drug crimes that now carry shorter sentences.

Obama wrote in a signed notification that he granted Gill’s application “because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around. … Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity.”

In interviews last year, Gill said he sustained hope even as his three co-defendants died behind bars.

“I believed there were people in government with rational minds who sooner or later would realize that the sentence wasn’t fair,” Gill said then. “Yes, you have the thought that you’re going to die in prison — that’s a human reaction. But there’s always the possibility that they’ll acknowledge the injustice.”

After his release in 2015, he began working as a paralegal for local criminal defense law firm LaHood & Calfas, and he appeared to make the most of it. A Vietnam veteran who succumbed to the world of drugs, he said he sought to reform himself. He brought several clients to the practice through contacts he made while living at Crosspoint, a halfway house, attorney Neil Calfas, who hired him, told the paper last year.

“One of the things Bobby has is street credibility,” Calfas said at the time. “If someone is charged with a crime, they know he’s spent 25 years in prison. That allows him to be a buffer between the lawyers and the clients.”

But unknown to his employer, and hours after meeting with a federal probation officer this week, Gill reportedly bought 1 kilogram of cocaine, or a little more than 2 pounds, while being watched Thursday by agents with Homeland Security Investigations, and he was arrested after a pursuit also involving Bexar County sheriff’s deputies, according to federal court records.

According to a criminal complaint affidavit, HSI agents received information about Gill’s renewed involvement in drugs in mid-January. On Thursday, he contacted an unidentified person, via phone, to arrange a deal to buy a kilo of cocaine, according to the affidavit.

About 5:30 p.m., Gill met with that person in the parking lot of Fiesta Food Mart at 6050 Ingram Road and received a black backpack that he put in the car he was driving, the affidavit said. As he left the parking lot on Ingram Road, a sheriff’s deputy in a marked patrol car tried to pull him over.

Gill, the affidavit said, fled at high speed, and the car he was in collided with another vehicle at Callaghan and Bandera roads.

He again tried to flee, but his vehicle was disabled by cars of other law enforcement officers, according to the affidavit. Agents found the backpack in the car, which contained a kilo of cocaine, the affidavit said.

He “related that he was going to sell the cocaine to make money and would be paying a female $26,000 for the cocaine,” the affidavit said.

“I’m so disappointed to hear that he got arrested again,” said Ronald Schmidt, a lawyer who helped Gill appeal his life sentence in the courts.

“I know the mandatory minimums were really stacked against Bobby,” Schmidt said. “We all have free will, and apparently, he made a bad decision again and he’s going to have to suffer the consequences again. That’s unfortunate.”

“We are very shocked and extremely saddened by these allegations,” Calfas said Friday. “At some point, as a civilized society we need to rethink our drug policy. If the allegations against Bobby Gill are true, this is clear proof that extreme prison sentences and mandatory minimums under the federal sentencing guidelines don’t work.”

gcontreras@express-news.net