Drug investigation turns into case of sexual abuse
On Jan. 13, a high school nurse saved the life of a 17-year-old girl by giving her a dose of Narcan after she was found unresponsive in a school bathroom from a fentanyl overdose.
Soon, police had the name of her alleged drug supplier: a Contra Costa County resident named Javier Antonio Ramirez. But almost immediately, the investigation switched gears from a potential fentanyl dealing case to allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.
Ramirez is now in Santa Rita Jail on a no-bail hold, facing charges of receiving child porn. The charge is based on evidence from his phone that he was paying another person pre-agreed sums for access to terabytes of videos depicting children aged 5 to 17 being sexually abused, according to the criminal complaint.
Authorities also believe that Ramirez was sexually abusing the 17-year-old girl, that he filmed and posted some of the abuse to social media sites like Instagram, and that none of this was discovered until after the girl nearly died.
After the overdose, unspecified witnesses provided Contra Costa County sheriff's investigators with the nickname “Lucky” as the man who was giving fentanyl to the girl. When police used the nickname to find Ramirez's Instagram page, they were greeted with a publicly posted video showing the girl engaged in a sex act with Ramirez, according to the criminal complaint.
Roughly two weeks later, on Feb. 1, the girl's mother called Ramirez, while police taped the conversation. During the call he allegedly “acknowledged he was having sex” with the girl last December, the complaint says. In an interview with police days later, the girl — known in court records only as “Minor Victim 1” — acknowledged she started buying cocaine and other drugs from Ramirez after he direct-messaged her on Instagram last year.
“Minor Victim 1 said Ramirez started to `like' her so he would lower his drug prices for her. Minor Victim 1 said she first had sex with Ramirez in November 2022,” Contra Costa District Attorney Senior Inspector Darryl Holcombe wrote in the criminal complaint. The girl said they would go to San Francisco to buy fentanyl and that one time Ramirez consumed the drug while his young child was just a few feet away, according to the complaint.
On the day of her overdose, the girl said she and Ramirez had gone to San Francisco to buy fentanyl, authorities say.
In Ramirez's phone, police found evidence that Ramirez had tapped into one of the darkest confines of the internet, the underground child sex abuse material market. He had allegedly requested prices for child pornography and been sent screen shots asking for $80 for four terabytes of “teen and CP (child pornography) content age 5-17,” with “rape, CP, incest, and much more.”
Videos depicting Minor Victim 1, as well as other videos depicting a young girl, whose age was estimated between 6 and 8, were also found on Ramirez's phone, police said. Authorities believe the video of the young girl was downloaded, not filmed by Ramirez.
Ramirez was arrested in 2015 in Contra Costa County on suspicion of unlawful sex with a minor — to which he pleaded no contest in order to dismiss more serious child molestation charges — and he served a multiyear prison term for assault with a firearm, court records show.