Jury trial begins for Fairfield man in child sex assault
A Solano Superior Court trial started Thursday for a 33-year-old Fairfield man charged with multiple counts of child sex assaults.
Felipe Jesus Rios-Angulo sat at the defense table in Department 9 Tuesday morning, his attorney, Vincent Maher, at this side.
Opening statements, with Deputy District Attorney Kathleen McBride going first, ended shortly before 11 a.m. for a trial expected to take three weeks in the Justice Center in Fairfield.
A Mexican national not in custody, Rios-Angulo, whose date with a jury had been delayed and previously rescheduled more than once in recent years, is accused of continued sexual abuse of a child under 14 and six counts of lewd acts with a child 14 or 15, among other charges.
In May 2018, Rios-Angulo
pleaded not guilty to 18 charges, all felonies, and all involving the same child between 2015 and 2017.
McBride called her first witness, a young woman in a dark blue sweatshirt, who identified Rios-Angulo when asked to do so.
Seated on the witness stand with a “support person” at her side, the woman, the apparent victim, said she was 13 when she met Rios-Angulo more than seven years ago.
Questioned by McBride, she described in detail the home she lived in as young teenager, including the room she slept in, and started to weep quietly, wiping tears away with her sweatshirt sleeve.
At one point, describing one of Rios-Angulo's alleged sexual advances, she said he started kissing her while standing behind her as she combed her hair. He also kissed her on the mouth and neck.
“Had you ever been kissed like that before?”
McBride asked.
“No,” she said.
As she spoke, Rios-Angulo appeared to be casting his eyes downward at the defense table and did not make frequent eye contact with the witness.
During the afternoon session, the witness alleged that, when they were alone in a room at another time, the defendant began touching her under the Tshirt she wore “for about a minute.”
“Did anything like that happen again?” McBride asked.
“Yes,” the witness replied, recounting an instance in a home's laundry room.
Shortly afterward, Judge Carlos R. Gutierrez, seeing the witness appear to be overwhelmed with emotion, recessed the proceeding for five minutes.
Resuming her direct questioning, McBride asked the witness whether she talked “to anyone about what happened.”
“No,” the witness replied.
Rios-Angulo's trial follows an early January 2019 arraignment on the charges after a December 2018 preliminary hearing.
During the arraignment, Maher noted that his client had been arrested in Sacramento by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Rios-Angulo posted a $160,000 bond and was released but he still faces possible deportation if convicted.
Maher said that the bond and a previous $255,000 bond related to the sex abuse case had “crippled my client and his family,” and asked the judge, asserting his client was not a flight risk, to forgo an increase in bail.
Citing testimony from the Dec. 4 preliminary hearing, Maher further characterized some of the District Attorney's charges as vague, adding that the DA's investigation and the information it yielded may have been inconsistent with the police report.
Gutierrez denied the DA's request for a bail increase but reminded RiosAngulo about an existing restraining order not to go near the victim or her family.
Court records show the DA filed a complaint May 2, 2018. On June 21, the court issued a subpoena for records held by the FairfieldSuisun Unified School District. Rios-Angulo posted the $255,000 bond June 26.
If convicted on all charges, he faces a lengthy state prison sentence.
The trial resumes at 10 a.m. today in Department 9 in the Justice Center in Fairfield.