An older teenager testified Thursday morning that she was co-habitating with an accused sex offender while he allegedly was having sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl.
The witness, now 19, testified in the trial of Raul Manuel Magallanez Jr., who is accused of raping a 13-year-old and multiple counts of indecent liberties with a minor, sexual exploitation of a child, furnishing alcohol or drugs with illicit intent, as well as one count of intimidation of a witness. Three cases against him have been combined into one jury trial.
In keeping with The Gazette’s policy to shield identities of youngsters involved in the case, the older teen will be referrerd to as “the witness.”
She said that she met Magallanez at a fast-food restaurant where he worked in mid-August 2005. By October, she was spending some nights at his house instead of going to her home in an adjoining county, and in mid-November she moved into the home Magallanez and his mother shared.
She said she knew Girl No. 1, a 14-year-old who was dating Magallanez’s nephew, and that both were at the house “quite often.”
“We’d sit there and talk most of the time,” the witness said. “When she talked Manuel into it, he’d go buy her alcohol. Sometimes we’d drink it in the car in front of the house, but sometimes it was in the house.”
The witness also said that Magallanez told her he was having a sexual relationship with the 14-year-old. He talked about their having sex in his car and said that sometimes the girl would sneak into his bedroom and they would have sex there.
“At first I didn’t believe it because she’s so young, and then I got to know her a little bit and she liked alcohol and he bought it,” she said.
She testified that she had seen the girl drunk, slurring her words and stumbling.
She said she confronted Magallanez in December 2005 about the girl.
“I got tired of him going and seeing her and he said he couldn’t stop or else she’d turn him into the police because what he was doing was wrong,” she said. “He said he’d rather give in to her than go to jail. So, somehow he talked me into it ... letting her come over, letting him see her, letting him be around her.”
The girl continued to come to the home and spend time with Magallanez in his car, the witness said during cross-examination.
“She came in but they didn’t talk, not when they were inside the house,” the witness said. “She’d come in and go to the bathroom. I stayed in his room. ... He said she wasn’t supposed to know that I was living there.”
The witness talked about a number of young people from Emporia and surrounding towns who visited and spent time at the apartment while she was there. She did not know all of their last names, but knew that one was a cheerleader because she had seen the girl wearing a cheerleading outfit.
The witness also had a friend who sometimes spent the night with her, Magallanez, and his mother in the two bedroom house.
“All three of us slept in his bed,” she said. “She slept next to me against the wall, I slept in the middle and he slept on the edge.”
Magallanez’s nephew also stayed overnight about half of the time and slept in a recliner chair.
She said that the defendant often videotaped the young people while they were with him.
Assistant County Attorney Amy Aranda asked her about a black video camera that earlier in the trial was alleged to have been used to produce a video of the 14-year-old and her boyfriend having sex, with Magallanez joining in as he recorded.
She said that Magallanez would not allow her to see the videos he recorded.
“He never let me watch it at all,” she said. “No matter what, he’d guard it.”
She and a girlfriend searched for the recorder and found it at the end of December 2005. The tape the girls watched showed Girl No. 1 naked on the bed the witness and Magallanez shared.
When asked later how she knew where the filming was done, she responded, “It was my Tweety Bird pillow and that’s my pillow. It was my pillow.”
She said the recording showed Girl No. 1 and her boyfriend engaging in a sexual act and Magallanez engaging in a sexual act, initially by himself, that also was shown on the tape.
She said she “kinda freaked out” after she saw it. She handed the tape to her friend.
“I told my friend to hide it because I was going to use it, going to turn it in,” she said.
She said that Magallanez caught her with the video camera and reacted by yelling at her and ordering her to go into the house, where he locked her and himself into their bedroom and threatened her with a box-cutting knife.
“He said, ‘Give it back or I’ll kill you,’” she said.
She screamed at her friend to give the tape to Magallanez. After the tape was returned, she said that the defendant again threatened her.
“He said, ‘If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you,’” she said, crying and unable to speak for a few moments.
“You did not leave him then?” Aranda asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” Aranda asked.
“Because I was pregnant,” the witness said.
During questioning later in the morning, she said explained further why she wanted to keep the tape.
“I wanted to hide the tape so that if he ever tried to get my child, he couldn’t; so I could use it against him,” she said.
“So you were going to take this tape to use it as blackmail...?” defense attorney Julia Spainhour asked.
“In the process, I wanted to put him in jail, too, for what he did,” the witness said.
She testified that she left Magallanez in February 2006, after he began serving time in the Lyon County Jail on a conviction for promoting obscenities to a minor. That charge had evolved from his taking Girl No. 1 to an adult store, where she had purchased a vibrator and warming lotion.
The witness, who since has married, said that she later filed for a restraining order to protect herself from Magallanez, after an incident at the Emporia Wal-Mart store.
She saw his cousin there and as they were leaving, she noticed Magallanez following her and her husband.
“He did like a gun to me and he told me he was going to kill me,” she said. “And after that, he followed us home” to her parents’ house in another town.
“Were you scared of him?” Aranda asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Were you scared to testify today?” Aranda asked.
“Yes,” the witness responded.
She said she did not appear in court to complete the legal process for a restraining order because she and her husband had moved.
“I figured if he couldn’t find me, he couldn’t do anything to me,” the witness said.