Another teenager accuses ex-Hialeah cop of sexual assault, feds say
■ Jesús Menocal Jr., who was fired amid sexual-misconduct charges, is now accused of forcing a teen in a mental-health crisis to give him oral sex, court records show.
Jesús Menocal Jr., the ex-Hialeah cop accused of using his badge to pressure young women into having sex with him, faces a new federal charge that he forced a 19-year-old experiencing a mental-health crisis to give him oral sex in the bathroom of a police station, violating her civil rights.
Prosecutors also claim Menocal boasted about having a sexual relationship with a Hialeah internalaffairs detective who tipped him off about ongoing investigations into his conduct and that he tried to pressure a young police-academy cadet into having an abortion after he got her pregnant, according to federal court records. Menocal was the cadet’s instructor.
In addition, the previously unreported court documents accuse Menocal of threatening several alleged victims after assaulting them, telling one woman that he knew she had complained to the Hialeah detective with whom he was sleeping. He told the young woman that he was
unstoppable.
“You can’t kill a beast, you can’t knock me down,” Menocal said, according to the documents. “I’m a beast.”
The latest federal charge comes in addition to previous counts accusing him of using his authority as a police officer to violate the civil rights of two young women, one of them a 17year-old minor. Menocal,
33, has pleaded not guilty to all three charges, including the new one. If convicted, he faces between 10 years and life in prison because one of the counts includes allegations of kidnapping and using his weapon.
Menocal was fired from his police job in late 2019 after being arrested by the FBI but is free on a $250,000 bond as he awaits trial in late May. Six women and girls, among them a 14-year-old, are now known to have accused the former cop of sexual assault.
A spokesman for the Hialeah Police Department did not respond when asked if the department was aware of the allegation that Menocal was improperly receiving information from one of its internal-affairs detectives while having a sexual relationship with her. The spokesman also would not reveal the detective’s name or say whether she had faced any investigation or discipline.
The new federal charge stems from an alleged incident on May 31, 2015, when a 19-year-old woman was driving in a car with her boyfriend and began banging her head against the vehicle’s window and talking about killing herself, prosecutors said. The boyfriend drove her to a Hialeah police substation for help. Instead, officers handcuffed the woman and her boyfriend after finding cocaine and marijuana in the car.
Menocal was the ranking officer on scene, according to a court document detailing the allegation. The decorated former sergeant, “who was much taller and larger than the [victim],” approached the handcuffed young woman and repeatedly told her he would release her if she performed oral sex on him, prosecutors said. (Despite his promise to release her, Menocal had no such power under Florida’s Baker Act.)
Under duress, the woman eventually agreed to Menocal’s demands for oral sex, according to the document.
Menocal then told her to ask to use the substation’s bathroom, which she did, and escorted her into the substation — something captured on exterior surveillance cameras, prosecutors say. Once inside, Menocal took her to an area that was out of view of the facility’s cameras. There, it is alleged, Menocal took off her handcuffs and made her perform oral sex — before putting the cuffs back on her wrists and telling her not to tell anyone about what had happened. He ignored her questions about why she was not being released and placed her in the backseat of a Hialeah police vehicle. Another officer then drove her to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation.
The victim was identified thanks to the surveillance footage. Other footage showed Menocal taking a total of 11 women into the substation in a one-month period between May and June 2015, according to the government.
“All of these incidents occurred on the weekend or after 5:00 p.m.,” prosecutors wrote in court documents. “The video evidence then shows the defendant bringing each of these women into closed rooms in the substation that were not covered by the surveillance system.”
Menocal did not file reports documenting any of these encounters, a violation of police protocol.
The new charge for violating the 19-year-old woman’s civil rights was filed in Miami federal court last
May but received little notice because of the coronavirus pandemic. Menocal was originally charged in December 2019 with violating the civil rights of two other women in cases that followed a similar pattern. In each instance, the officer — armed and in uniform — said he would arrest the young women unless they had sex with him, prosecutors allege.
Menocal’s alleged misconduct was first revealed to Hialeah police in 2015, when four women and girls told investigators that the sergeant had assaulted them. The youngest victim was just 14 when she said Menocal forced her to perform oral sex after threatening her with jail time if she didn’t comply. But Hialeah Police Chief Sergio Velázquez did not fire Menocal until the FBI arrested him in late 2019 — four years after the victims lodged their complaints. Menocal kept his gun and badge for much of that time, even receiving a raise.
Velázquez has said he could not discipline Menocal because of departmental policies, although policing experts and former chiefs from other South Florida departments told the Miami Herald that wasn’t true. The office of Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle declined to charge Menocal with sexual battery and false imprisonment in 2016, saying the victims would make unreliable witnesses in court. Some were victims of human trafficking. The investigation was then picked up by FBI publiccorruption agents and federal prosecutors, who dug deeper into Menocal’s alleged misconduct on duty.
Menocal’s attorney, Michael Grieco, declined to comment for this story.
Grieco, a Democratic state representative from South Florida, has not said anything publicly about his defense strategy in the Menocal case. But it appears from the court record that he plans to attack the credibility of the women by highlighting their work as “prostitutes” in Hialeah.
During a federal court hearing last year about questions for potential jurors, Grieco said that prosecutors were “trying to use the jury selection process to minimize the fact that just about all of their witnesses and alleged victims are criminals and/or prostitutes.”
Menocal’s arrest and federal indictment came after a series of Herald stories in 2019 about his pattern of behavior toward vulnerable young women.
One of the alleged victims, Suzy Betancourt, died in November 2015 — five months after telling Hialeah internal affairs detectives that Menocal assaulted her. According to a police report, Betancourt died after jumping out of a moving car, a death that Miami-Dade police ruled an accident but that her family and friends found suspicious.
In a sworn statement before her death, Betancourt told investigators that Menocal threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone what he did to her.
‘YOU CAN’T HAVE A BABY RIGHT NOW’
In addition to the new charge against Menocal, federal prosecutors are seeking to introduce evidence about two other alleged victims without filing criminal charges citing their cases.
The government wants to introduce the additional evidence to show that Menocal had a consistent pattern of using his position of authority to prey on young women, lead prosecutor Edward Stamm said in a court filing.
One of the additional victims came forward to Hialeah police after the Herald series. Her story has not been made public until now.
The woman told police that in late 2014, when she was 19, Menocal pulled up to her in his marked police vehicle as she was walking down the street to a Hialeah gym. She said the cop told her the neighborhood wasn’t safe and offered to give her a ride. She refused, but prosecutors said Menocal changed “his tone from concern to coercion” and began insisting that she was “prowling.”
After she reluctantly got in his patrol car, Menocal drove her in the opposite direction from the gym to a deserted alley near a strip club and forced her to perform oral sex. “At some point while she was in the defendant’s car, [the victim], fearing what was going to happen, started the recording feature on her phone and left it on the seat, producing an audio recording of a portion of their encounter,” the document states. Prosecutors said they obtained a copy of the recording.
Menocal also forced her to have sexual intercourse, the document alleges.
A few weeks later, Menocal again picked up the woman in his patrol car, this time taking her to a “remote wooded area” and forcing her to have intercourse, prosecutors said. The woman exchanged “friendly-appearing” text messages with Menocal during this time because she was afraid of him and he knew where she lived and worked, according to the filing.
By the time the woman came forward, the five-year statute of limitations for federal civil rights violations had expired.
The other victim included in the evidentiary filing is the 14-year-old girl, whose case the Herald reported on extensively in 2019. Prosecutors plan to call the victim’s mother as a witness, saying she will testify that around the time Menocal allegedly assaulted her daughter in late 2014, the young teenager “stopped going to school, was running away [and] ... started cutting herself and was Baker Acted as a result.”
Prosecutors did not explain why they were not charging the former officer over her case.
The filing, dated Aug. 10 of last year, also confirms details of a consensual sexual relationship that Menocal had with a 22-year-old female cadet at the Miami Dade College School of Justice in 2017 when he was an instructor. The relationship, first revealed in a Herald story, violated academy rules and ended when the cadet became pregnant.
Menocal pressured the cadet to have an abortion, telling her “if you want to be a police officer, you can’t have a baby right now,” the filing states.
“He told her that if she told somebody about their relationship or the pregnancy, he would make sure that she never became a police officer and that he would call his connections from every department and tell them not to hire her,” the filing states. “In addition, when [the cadet] learned that the defendant was married, he attempted to convince her to keep their affair secret by telling her that if it came out, his wife would leave him and it would destroy his family right after they had just had another child.”
After the cadet’s classmates found out about the relationship and informed instructors, Menocal dictated a resignation letter for her to submit to the academy and convinced her to tell academy officials that the affair never happened, according to prosecutors. Menocal also persuaded her not to speak to Hialeah internal affairs investigators.
“Thereafter, the defendant thanked her and offered to help her start at the City of Miami Academy or find her a job at his grandmother’s security company, but she turned down these offers,” the document states.
The cadet is cooperating with the FBI and has provided her text messages with Menocal, the government says.
Additionally, prosecutors are seeking to introduce the surveillance footage showing Menocal bringing young women into the substation to illustrate how he planned his alleged sexual assaults.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams will soon decide whether prosecutors can present the evidence about the two additional alleged victims, the academy cadet and the surveillance footage.
Grieco, Menocal’s defense attorney, opposed the government’s effort to use information about the footage and the cadet.
“There is no evidence whatsoever that the defendant [Menocal] conducted any sexual activities with the females seen on the video surveillance,” Grieco wrote in a court filing. “The government’s leap to suggest that the defendant conducted sexual activities with the females on the video surveillance screams of an attempt to confuse [and] inflame the jury.”
As for permitting evidence of Menocal’s relationship with the cadet, Grieco said it is “irrelevant” to the sexual misconduct allegations against his client: “The government’s request to admit the evidence of the defendant’s consensual sexual relationship with
[the] academy trainee and text messages fails [legally] because it is irrelevant and not similar to the charges that the defendant allegedly engaged in non-consensual sex while on police duty.”
Grieco’s filing does not address whether the jury should hear evidence about the victim who came forward after the statute of limitations had expired or about the 14-year-old girl.