A 50-year-old man repeatedly molested a girl starting when she was 12 while he was dating her mother in La Habra, a prosecutor told jurors Monday, but the defendant’s attorney said the accuser is lying.
Mario Rodriguez Vasquez is charged with seven counts of forcible lewd acts on a child and two counts of lewd acts on a child aged 14 or 15, all felonies. He is accused of molesting the girl from 2017 through the end of 2019.
“Alone, confused and scared,” Deputy District Attorney Sean Riordan said in his opening statement of the trial.
“That’s exactly how (the accuser) felt as she (lay) on the bedroom floor with the defendant and her mother nearby… As she tried to stop the defendant, told him to stop… tried to move her body so he couldn’t touch her anymore and yet he persisted, and all for his own personal sexual gratification.”
The accuser’s mother began dating Vasquez when the girl was 12, Riordan said. The alleged molestation occurred when they lived apart and continued when the girl’s mother moved into an apartment with Vasquez’s relatives, Riordan said.
The alleged molestation continued until “January 2020 when she couldn’t take it anymore,” Riordan said. The girl confided in a cousin, and when word spread, the accuser’s middle school counselor “heard she was unwell” and checked on her at La Habra High School, Riordan said. The girl disclosed the alleged molestation to her counselor, and police “got involved,” the prosecutor said.
When police questioned Vasquez, Riordan said there were “40 minutes of denials” before he eventually conceded “some of these things could happen.”
“The defendant for years, over many attempts to stop him, forced himself on her,” Riordan said. “He took advantage of a scared and confused little girl.”
However, Vasquez’s attorney, Jamie Kim of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, said when the girl came forth with the allegations, “she was troubled” and “had the attention of social workers” and others who offered to help and yet never reported she was molested.
“She had opportunities to report it,” Kim said. “She had resources offered to help her and at no point in the time leading up to January 2020 did she report it.”
The defense attorney added, “There was a history of lying, there were self-serving reasons, shifting of blame, shifting of attention.”
The day before she came forward with the allegations, the accuser had skipped class and was scolded by her mother, Kim said. The girl didn’t come home that night, the attorney said.
The girl showed up at her aunt’s home the following morning and, as she was walking to school with her mother threatening to call police, she confided in her cousin, Kim said.
Vasquez voluntarily spoke to La Habra police detectives Nicholas Backlit and Paul Martinez, Kim said. He brought along a “support person,” who was there to help bail him out if necessary, Kim said.
“He says from the outside, `I haven’t done anything,’ ” Kim said. “Mr. Vasquez was there to assert his innocence.”
But the detectives “were not there to accept his explanations… They’re not seeking information, but affirmation of what was told to them by (the accuser),” Kim said.
The detectives turned the questioning “into an interrogation,” and used various legal techniques and claimed to have forensic evidence such as DNA and a videotaped encounter, Kim said.
When the detectives left the room, the defendant and the other man discussed telling the police what they wanted to hear so they could arrange for bail, Kim said.