Fairfield man gets 50 years for multiple child sex assaults
Felipe J. Rios-Angulo, 34 and a Mexican national, was found guilty in June of during a trial in Department 9 in the Justice Center in Fairfield
Found guilty last year of 18 felony charges of child sex assault, a 34-year-old Fairfield man on Monday heard a judge sentence him to 50 years in state prison, The Reporter has learned.
Felipe Jesus Rios-Angulo, a Mexican national who had been in Solano County Jail custody since the jury verdict in June, appeared for his sentencing in Department 9, Judge Carlos R. Gutierrez's courtroom, in the Justice Center in Fairfield.
Court records indicate the judge considered a report from the county Probation Department but denied probation for Rios-Angulo, who required a Spanishlanguage interpreter to understand the proceeding.
At sentencing, Gutierrez advised Rios-Angulo of his appeal rights and ordered him to register as a sex offender and to complete DNA testing.
Deputy District Attorney Kathleen McBride prosecuted the case during a nearly three-week trial, and criminal defense attorney Vincent Maher represented Rios-Angulo.
In May 2018, out on bail and not in custody at the time, Rios-Angulo pleaded not guilty to the 18 counts, all involving the same child at various times between 2015 and 2017. They included several allegations of lewd acts upon a child under 14; forcible lewd acts upon a child; and lewd acts on a child by a person at least 10 years older than the victim, among them kissing her; forcible touching; and other acts.
When the jury returned to the courtroom to render their verdicts, the court clerk began to read each one and, by the fourth, RiosAngulo raised his head and looked at the ceiling for several seconds. Wearing headphones, he displayed no discernible emotion.
Afterward, Rios-Angulo, in handcuffs, was escorted out of the courtroom and to Solano County Jail.
The case ended four years and one month after the Solano County DA's Office filed the complaint against him. During McBride's calm and deliberate closing argument, she said the defendant made “cruel, selfish and perverse choices” against a 13- and 14-yearold child that changed the life of a young girl who, by then, had turned 19.
She told the jury of seven men and five women that a conviction of a sexual assault crime may be based on testimony from a single witness, the victim. Maher, in his closing argument, said the case “really comes down to credibility,” noting the victim admitted to lying on the witness stand.
McBride explained the charges and the laws that apply: lewd or lascivious acts involving children; a lewd and lascivious act using force, duress, menace or fear; and committing a lewd and lascivious act with a child under 14.
“You don't have rape, oral copulation or sexual penetration,” she told the jurors. “These crimes have to do with touching.”
“The reality” of most sex assault cases is that evidence comes from a single complaining witness who suffered the crimes in privacy, “with no camera, no DNA,” acts that occur between two people “alone in a room,” McBride said in her 70-minute argument.
McBride reminded jurors they heard from the victim's friends, that Rios-Angulo wanted to continue the relationship with the victim, even going so far as to visit her school after the families discontinued seeing one another.
Calling Rios-Angulo “opportunistic,” she referred to text messages from him to the victim, calling them “damning evidence of his guilt” and a “road map to his guilt.”
McBride asserted that witnesses called by the defense had “a motive to lie.”
In her summary, she said to jurors that, if they struggle to come to a verdict, they should ask themselves what the victim gained by testifying in public?
Maher began his closing argument by saying that attorneys “don't deal with speculation.”
“Verdicts are about certainty,” he added, suggesting the victim's testimony was unreliable because she repeatedly asked the attorney to repeat what he regarded as simple questions, adding that her statements rose to “a certain level of disingenuousness.”
Ending his remarks, Maher said McBride had not made her case for guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
In the end, however, the jury believed she had.