Man awaiting rape trial charged again
Woman says she was assaulted four days after judge released suspect in teen’s attack from GPS monitoring
A man accused of raping a Santa Fe teen in October faces new charges after a woman who said she had met Maury Montel Elliott late Jan. 9 outside a downtown bar alleged he raped her early the next morning.
The woman might have been drugged, Santa Fe police wrote in an affidavit seeking an arrest warrant for 23-year-old Elliott, who had moved to the city from Philadelphia just months before his arrest in the previous rape case involving a 15-year-old girl.
The warrant was issued Thursday, but Elliott had not yet been arrested, according to online court and jail records.
The woman reported she was raped four days after a state district judge released Elliott from electronic monitoring as he awaits a trial in the October case.
Henry Varela, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office, said prosecutors now plan to ask a
judge to order Elliott jailed without bond until both cases are resolved.
“Once he is picked up by law enforcement, we fully intend to file for pre-trial detention,” Varela said in an email Thursday.
The arrest warrant affidavit, filed in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court, said Elliott has been charged with two counts of third-degree criminal sexual penetration.
His accuser told police she and a friend had arrived at a downtown hotel the afternoon of Jan. 9 and visited Evangelo’s, a nearby bar, around 10 p.m. Elliott approached them outside the bar and offered them cocaine, the woman said, according to the affidavit, and after they declined his offer, he followed them into the bar.
The friend soon left and returned to the hotel because she didn’t feel comfortable around Elliott, the affidavit said.
The accuser, who stayed at the bar, left her drink with Elliott when she went to an ATM, and during that time, he might have slipped drugs into her drink, the affidavit said, adding the woman told police she had felt as if she were drugged that night.
Elliott told her he needed help getting home, the woman said, so she requested an Uber ride for him and then decided to go with him to his apartment.
When they arrived, she told police, he tried to kiss her and ignored her resistance, instead pushing her onto his bed, removing her clothing and raping her.
According to the affidavit, she told police “she felt that if she had resisted more, she would be hurt more.”
After the attack, the woman said, she left Elliott’s apartment, thinking she was close to her hotel, and began walking down Cerrillos Road. She told police she felt drugged and was hallucinating as she flagged down a city of Santa Fe pickup. The driver took her back to her hotel around 3 a.m., the affidavit said.
Later that morning, Elliott texted the woman, telling her she had left her purse at his apartment, the affidavit said. After retrieving her purse, the woman went to the Santa Fe Police Department to report the incident and met with a sexual assault nurse examiner at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center.
Elliott was first arrested Oct. 24, after a 15-year-old girl told an assistant principal at her high school she had been sexually assaulted by Elliott and a second man Oct. 4.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit in that case, Elliott and the second man, Derrick Shawn Chavez, 25, had approached the girl and her friend Sept. 27 while they were eating ice cream on the Plaza. The men offered the girls alcohol, which they both refused, the affidavit said. But the four exchanged the names on their social media accounts, and Chavez reached out to the 15-year-old about a week later in a social media message, asking her to sneak out of her home to meet him and Elliott.
The girl met the two men around 10 p.m. Oct. 3, the affidavit said. She told police the men gave her alcohol and Elliott blew cannabis smoke into her mouth, causing her to feel dizzy and vomit several times. They took her to an apartment, the girl said, alleging Elliott then raped her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
Chavez, who eventually surrendered to police, and Elliott initially faced identical charges: two counts of second-degree criminal sexual penetration and one count each of criminal sexual contact of a minor, kidnapping and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Chavez’s case has since been dismissed without prejudice from Santa Fe County Magistrate Court, and he has not yet been indicted in state District Court, according to online court records.
Elliott, meanwhile, was indicted by a grand jury Dec. 10 on the five charges.
He was released from jail Oct. 28 on an unsecured $2,500 bond and a GPS monitoring device ordered by Magistrate David Segura. On Nov. 6, he was arrested again for allegedly failing to charge his monitoring device and was held in jail until Nov. 19.
The District Attorney’s Office didn’t request pretrial detention for Elliott, so when he appeared for a District Court hearing Jan. 6, Judge T. Glenn Ellington allowed his release from GPS monitoring.
Elliott is scheduled to appear at a pretrial hearing March 25 in the October case.