Coach in Pecos charged in rape of Mora girl
Police say middle school assistant in 2016 assaulted 14-year-old while working for Mora High hoops team
boys A former basketball Mora manager High School and Pecos assistant Middle School coach was arrested by New Mexico State Police officers Wednesday on suspicion of raping a 14-year-old female Mora student, slamming her head against a floor and wall and stabbing her with a steak knife in 2016, and sending explicit messages to her in February.
Apolonio Blea, now 21, was charged in the San Miguel County Magistrate Court with one count of criminal sexual penetration of a child between 13 and 18 by force or coercion, a count of criminal sexual communication with a child and a count of aggravated battery.
Blea was a part of Mora’s boys basketball program for the 2016-17 season. While Mora athletic director Mike Maldonado said Blea was a manager, a team roster on Maxpreps.com lists him as a volunteer coach that year.
Pecos head boys basketball coach Ira Harge Jr. said Blea was an assistant coach at Pecos Middle School in the current school year. Earlier this month, another Pecos coach, assistant high school boys basketball coach Dominick Baca, was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting two female students.
An arrest warrant affidavit in Blea’s case, filed Tuesday in San Miguel Magistrate Court by state police Officer Cruzita Romero, says the girl told investigators during an interview in March that she had started communicating with him through Facebook in October 2016, and then by text messages, phone calls and Skype. She snuck out of her house four times in a two-month period to meet with him, the affidavit alleges,
beginning on Halloween night in 2016.
A couple of weeks later, the girl said, Blea raped her after she rebuffed his request to sit with him on his bed as the two were watching TV at his home.
Romero says in the affidavit that she interviewed the girl at the nonprofit Tri-County Family Justice Center of Northeast New Mexico, an organization that works to prevent family violence and sexual assault and provides services to victims.
The affidavit did not provide a statement from Blea regarding the allegations.
The girl told Romero that Blea pushed her down, got on top of her and told her, “It’s my birthday, aren’t you going to give me a present?” She told him to stop and to get off of her, she said; Blea at one point replied, “No, it’s not your decision. I can see it in your eyes you want it.”
The girl continued to tell Blea to stop, the affidavit says, but he proceeded to rape her.
Their last meeting was in December 2016, according to the document. The girl told Blea she didn’t want to meet with him, the affidavit says, but he replied, “You’re going to, you have no choice.” When she arrived to meet him later, the girl said, he was “banging on the steering wheel” and said, “When I say be here, you have to be here at a certain time.”
In the affidavit, the girl described a pattern of behavior in which Blea demanded to see her phone to check her text messages, accused her of cheating and ordered her not to talk to her friends.
As the two entered Blea’s bedroom that day in December, he demanded her phone and then threw it against the wall when she told him she had deleted messages to a friend in which she had called Blea “a psycho,” according to the affidavit.
The girl said Blea then cut his hand with a steak knife and hit his head with a bottle. When she told Blea she wanted to go home, the affidavit says, he slammed her head against the floor and wall, and then stabbed her in the right leg.
Eventually, Blea took her home, the affidavit says, but ordered her to tell anyone who asked that she had stabbed herself.
When investigators asked the girl if the two had exchanged photos, the court document says, she told them she had sent Blea several explicit photos of herself and that he had exposed himself during a video chat, and she took screenshots of the exchange on her phone.
Officers obtained three images from her phone dated Feb. 19, 2018; two of them showed Blea’s face, according to the affidavit, and one appeared to show his genitals.