Sheriff Gibson letter: Ayala hindered case. ‘Blatant lies,’ she says
Sheriff Russ Gibson accused Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala of hindering the investigation into Nicole Montalvo’s killing by directing her staff not to assist detectives in obtaining evidence from the suspects’ phones or testimony from a key witness — a claim Ayala on Monday called “complete blatant lies.”
In a Jan. 29 letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, the Osceola County sheriff alleged “inaction” by Ayala’s office was not due to lack of evidence but instead Ayala’s “desire to advance her position against the death penalty” and asked for her removal from the case. Two days after Gibson’s letter, DeSantis reassigned the case to Ocala-based State Attor
ney Brad King.
“The State Attorney’s unwillingness to do everything possible to obtain justice flies in the face of her oath of office and led me to believe that the death penalty must be obstructing her ability to see this case properly,” Gibson wrote.
Reached by phone Monday, Ayala vehemently denied Gibson’s accusations.
“This letter is riddled with complete blatant lies,” she said. “This is not about inaccuracies. This is not about misrepresentations. And unfortunately, the attorney general and the governor based their perspective and decision on whatever action needed to be taken on lies. If they would have picked up the phone to call me, they would have had the clear, unadulterated truth.”
The Osceola County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Gibson’s letter or Ayala’s statements.
After her removal Friday, the Ninth Judicial Circuit’s top prosecutor said DeSantis’ executive order reassigning the case was “riddled with inaccurate facts,” including a claim, attributed to Gibson, that Ayala was “actively hindering the continued collection of evidence and investigation.” The state attorney said it was “unfortunate” the governor had taken the sheriff ’s word but had not consulted her.
Helen Aguirre Ferré, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, said the governor decided not to contact Ayala after she canceled a meeting with Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office to speak about the case. DeSantis and his legal team did a “careful review” of Gibson’s letter and the evidence and spoke with the slain St. Cloud mother’s family before making the decision, she said.
“Moving it to jurisdiction where this can be looked at impartially is in the best interests of serving justice and
the family,” Aguirre Ferré said.
More than a week after Montalvo’s dismembered remains were found on two properties owned by her estranged husband’s family, Gibson publicly asked Ayala to seek the death penalty against her accused killers — husband Christopher Otero-Rivera and father-inlaw Angel Rivera — during a Nov. 6 press conference, the sheriff said in his letter to DeSantis.
Ayala said the Sheriff’s Office still has not determined who killed the 33-year-old woman, and neither Montalvo’s estranged husband nor her father-in-law has been charged with murder. She also said Moody’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, when it agreed with Gibson that charges could be filed, had not seen important evidence, including DNA results or the medical examiner’s report.
In his letter, Gibson told the governor there had been “animosity” in his relationship with Ayala since March 2017, after she announced her office would not seek to impose capital punishment in first-degree murder cases and Gibson became a “vocal opponent” of her position.
Former Gov. Rick Scott removed Ayala from dozens of death penalty cases and reassigned them to King. After losing a legal battle against Scott over the reassignments, Ayala created a death penalty review panel to evaluate capital cases and decide whether to seek death.
After Gibson asked prosecutors to seek the death penalty in Montalvo’s case, he said Ayala requested to have a meeting with him.
“During that meeting it became painfully obvious that the State Attorney was unhappy with my comments regarding the death penalty and she asked me to stop making public comments regarding the death penalty,” Gibson wrote in his letter. “At that time she also indicated to us that the State Attorney’s Office would not be seeking a firstdegree murder indictment. Until that meeting, my detectives believed based on conversations with the assigned prosecutor that charges would be filed.”
After that meeting, Gibson said his detectives tried to work with Ayala’s staff to obtain additional evidence that would persaude the state attorney to allow the case to move forward, but Ayala’s staff had been told not to help investigators get evidence from the suspects’ phones or a key witness’ testimony. Gibson’s letter did not specify who that witness was or what detectives wanted to look for on the phones.
Ayala at a press conference Friday said it “could not be further from the truth” that she was hindering the case, saying her office had repeatedly “encouraged and requested” additional investigation by Gibson’s office. She said her homicide attorneys had sent an email to Gibson’s lead detective Dec. 16, asking him to perform 10 “tasks that were neglected by the sheriff and that my office believed would assist in the effort to bring forth homicide charges.”
Ayala did not specify what those tasks were. Her office denied a public record request by the Sentinel for the email, citing an exemption to Florida’s records law for attorney work product.
The sheriff in his letter said he reached out to Moody for a second opinion and her Office of Statewide Prosecution agreed that charges could be filed.
Statewide prosecutors planned to talk with Ayala Jan. 17 about the Montalvo case but the meeting was canceled — instead, Ayala held a press conference outside the Osceola County Courthouse where she rebuked Gibson for “blame and lies” in his criticism of her office’s handling of Montalvo’s killing. The state attorney said Gibson had provided the Office of Statewide Prosecution a “biased summary of the facts.”
Montalvo disappeared Oct. 21 after going to the Rivera family’s home on Hixon Avenue to drop off her son. Both men were arrested after deputies found her remains at that property and a nearby vacant lot owned by Rivera’s youngest son, Nicholas Rivera, who later told detectives he saw his father and older brother in a garage where Montalvo was lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood.
But evidence made public in the case so far doesn’t make clear how Montalvo was killed. Several legal experts told the Sentinel that prosecuting a first-degree murder based on circumstantial evidence is possible, but the lack of evidence directly tying one or both men to the killing makes doing so risky.
Otero-Rivera and his father are being held at the Osceola County Jail on other charges after prosecutors missed a deadline to indict for murder, which Ayala said happened because deputies rushed to make an arrest before gathering enough evidence against them.
“Had the sheriff followed the advice and listened to my office, we would have had unlimited amount of time to gather sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution and conviction, which is what Nicole and her family deserve,” said Ayala, whose office still had until mid-April to indict and avoid a violation of the state’s speedy trial rule.
But in his letter to the governor, Gibson said Ayala’s stance was “a blanket refusal to file charges when the manner of death is not an element that must be proven.”