Sex torture a ‘daily routine’
L.I. vics give gruesome details on foster dad
AS THE SHAKEN witness recalled years of sexual abuse from his foster dad, his eyes began filling with tears.
The adopted son of accused pedophile Cesar GonzalesMugaburu, in emotional testimony on Tuesday, recounted how he was raped at his foster father’s perverse whim.
“It was a daily routine, before and after school,” the now 29-year-old man testified. “Whenever he wanted, sexual encounters between me and Cesar would happen.”
The witness, on the edge of breaking down, was led from the courtroom before the tears started to flow. He was expected back on the stand Thursday.
The man was the third victim to take the stand Tuesday in the Riverhead, L.I., courtroom, providing the starkest account of what one of his fellow victims described as “hell.”
Gonzales-Mugaburu, 60, is on trial for the sexual abuse of eight kids — the youngest just an 8-year-old — while providing a home for close to 140 foster kids over 20 years.
With Gonzales-Mugaburu sitting only feet away at the defense table, a 14-year-old victim recounted how he once saw the family dog licking the foster care provider’s penis.
“I didn’t make any of this up,” said the boy, who just finished a month of hospitalization for post-traumatic stress disorder.
On another occasion, he told the courtroom, several of the boys asked GonzalesMugab uru what they were having for dinner.
“My meat,” the accused predator allegedly replied.
“I saw the real side of him,” the boy testified. “He would make a lot of sexual jokes, inappropriate gestures.”
The older witness, who first arrived at the defendant’s Ridge, L.I., home in 1996, recalled how the man he still calls Cesar started telling him tales about homosexuality.
“He would show me gay porn on TV,” the man testified. “He would say things to me like, ‘Every time I look at your butt it makes me horny.’ He would touch me on my butt. He would ask me to touch him.” The day’s first witness was a 12-year -old boy who explained how things turned twisted after he moved into the home in July 2015.
“It was fine,” the boy testified, before Gonzales-Mugaburu began making references to his penis. The youth recounted walking into the kitchen of their home one day to find a number of rulers on the table.
“(I asked) what the rulers were for,” he testified. “He says, ‘It’s to measure my penis.’”
The second incident occurred when the boy came home from school with his report card. Gonzales-Mugaburu, rather than asking about the boy’s grades, instead asked the child, “You want to see my penis?”
The child said GonzalesMugaburu was “about to unzipper it” — but never actually did.
The Long Island man was arrested in March 2015, accused of sexually abusing eight kids left in his care. He was also charged with having sex with a female dog as one of the children watched.
Defense attorney Donald Mates insisted last week in his opening argument that his client was a victim of a “witch hunt.”
But prosecutor Laurie Moroff described the defendant’s home as “a horrific place to live” where boys were sexually abused.
“It was like a candy store,” she told the jury. “Boys, more boys, young boys.”
The adopted son recalled how he initially viewed his arrival at the suburban home as his deliverance.
“My eyes blew up,” he recalled. “Big ol’ house and I was not used to a big house like that. It was normal. I walked in and seen different kids and thought, ‘My journey is over.’ ”