A Riverside woman accused with her husband of sexually abusing a boy and girl a decade ago pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple felony charges.
Dawn Renee Johnson, 48, was arrested last month with 47-year-old Jose Cruz Martinez following a Riverside Police Department investigation.
Johnson is charged with four counts each of sexual penetration of a child under 10 years old and forcible lewd acts on a child under 14, as well as one count of child cruelty, with sentence-enhancing allegations of targeting vulnerable victims, violating a position of trust and inflicting bodily injury.
Martinez is charged identically, with the exception of the child cruelty allegation.
Johnson was arraigned before Riverside County Superior Court Judge Gary Polk, who scheduled a felony settlement conference for March 1 at the Riverside Hall of Justice.
The defendant is being held on $2 million bail at the Smith Correctional Facility in Banning.
Martinez is being held on the same amount at the Smith jail. He is slated for arraignment on March 28.
According to Riverside police spokesman Officer Ryan Railsback, the pair came under investigation by the department’s Sexual Assault-Child Abuse Unit last fall following allegations by two victims now in their late teens.
They were identified in court documents only as Jane and John Doe.
The youths alleged they had been sexually abused by Johnson and Martinez on different occasions in the first half of the 2010s, according to Railsback.
The circumstances behind the alleged abuse were not detailed.
Detectives procured sufficient evidence to obtain and serve arrest warrants on the defendants in early January.
Prosecutors charged the couple separately.
Railsback said there are suspicions Martinez, by dent of his work as a youth volunteer at a Riverside church between 2016 and last September, may have assaulted other minors, but to date, he is only charged in the present case.
Johnson has no documented prior felony or misdemeanor convictions in Riverside County. Martinez has a prior misdemeanor conviction for driving on a suspended license, according to court records.