Pair indicted on child rape charges

Court files: Velarde boy, 8, says mother held him down while man assaulted him

A Rio Arriba County woman and her boyfriend have been indicted by a grand jury on child rape charges following an 8-year-old boy’s allegation that the man had sexually assaulted him with help from the woman, the child’s mother, at their trailer home in Velarde.

According to affidavits and other court documents filed in the state’s First Judicial District Court, the boy told an employee of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department during an interview in Taos late last month that his mother had held him down on a bed while 30-year-old Ezekiel Maestas raped him.

The New Mexican is not naming the mother of the boy to protect the child’s identity.

A sexual assault nurse examiner confirmed the boy had physical signs of sexual abuse and said he had told her he was too scared during the assault to protest, the court documents say. He added: “My mom whispered, ‘Don’t tell.’ ”

The couple, arrested earlier this month on charges of criminal sexual penetration of a minor, are being held in the Rio Arriba County jail. State prosecutors are asking a judge to keep them jailed until trial.

The troubling case is not the first time Maestas, a man with a violent criminal history, has faced a charge of sexually assaulting a minor. In 2016, a girl told police he had raped her at gunpoint near a skatepark in Española when she was 13. He initially faced charges of rape, kidnapping and aggravated battery in the case and spent about a month and half in jail.

But court documents show the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office, then under Jennifer Padgett, dropped the case and Maestas was released.

District Attorney Marco Serna, who defeated Padgett in the Democratic primary in 2016, said Thursday that notes in the case file indicate it was dropped because of a lack of evidence — and also because the accuser stopped cooperating with investigators.

“When any type of allegation like this is made,” he said, “we want to make sure that we get the evidence to prosecute and get a conviction. In this case, it’s unfortunate the victim refused to cooperate with law enforcement.”

Prosecutors in the Velarde case argue that the new charges against Maestas, as well as the 2016 charges — which were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the district attorney could refile them — and other charges in the man’s past are serious enough that he should remain in jail pending trial.

District Judge Jason Lidyard has not yet ruled on their motion for pretrial detention for both Maestas and the boy’s mother.

In 2011, prosecutors say, Maestas pleaded guilty to kidnapping. He also faced counts of child abuse and aggravated battery on a household member, but court records show prosecutors dropped the other charges.

In the 2016 case, a 14-year-old girl told police that about six months earlier, she and a friend had been walking home from a skatepark in Española when Maestas, a friend of her mother’s, drove up and hit them lightly from behind with his car.

Maestas then began arguing with the girls, an affidavit says, and pulled a gun out of his four-door sedan. The accuser said he took her and her friend to a field and then raped her, telling her, “Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger” as she tried to get away from him.

The accuser’s friend told police a similar story but said Maestas had raped the other girl in his car rather than in a field, according to the affidavit.

State police arrested Maestas after the girls came forward, but the case was dismissed five weeks after it was opened.

Serna said it was too late to gather DNA or physical evidence through a sexual assault examination of the accuser because the girls had come forward so long after the alleged attack. There also seemed to be conflicts in the girls’ statements, Serna said, and then the girls stopped cooperating with police.

His office would consider refiling charges in the case under the right circumstances, he said.

“If something were to change and we were to receive more evidence, or if the victims did decide to cooperate,” he said, “we would definitely take another look at it.”