Jurors had to leave the courtroom for a brief time Friday afternoon when a 15-year-old broke into uncontrollable tears while beginning to testify in the trial of Raul Manuel Magallanez Jr.
The trial, which began Monday in Lyon County District Court, is on three combined cases with a total of more than 60 charges against the defendant. Among the charges are rape of a 13-year-old, and multiple charges of sexual exploitation of a child, aggravated sodomy with a child, indecent liberties with a minor, furnishing alcohol to a minor with illicit intent, and a count of aggravated intimidation of a witness.
Judge Lee Fowler asked that the jury be removed until the girl could compose herself.
County Attorney Marc Goodman went to the witness stand to comfort her and learned why she had broken into tears after Assistant County Attorney Amy Aranda asked her to identify Magallanez in the courtroom.
“She broke her glasses last week and can’t see, and doesn’t want to get close to him,” Goodman explained.
The girl apparently could not see the defendant clearly across the room.
Goodman said that her new glasses should be in next week.
“Well, she can certainly testify without identifying him and come back and identify him,” Fowler said.
Testimony continued when the jury returned a few minutes later.
The girl, who will be referred to as “Girl No. 2” to protect her identity, said that she had met Magallanez when she went to his house with a mutual friend sometime in October. Other people also were present outside.
“He came over and talked to me,” she said. “He was telling me how pretty I was and stuff. I felt kind of weird because I didn’t know who he was.”
Magallanez asked for her telephone number, she said, and she did not give it to him at that time.
“Eventually I gave him my phone number and he started texting me,” she said. Sometimes they texted each other every couple of minutes at all times of the day and night, but not during school.
“He would text sexual stuff,” Girl No. 2 testified. At first the messages were innocuous, but later Magallanez allegedly moved into a sexual mode.
“Like, he’s like ‘I want to have sex with you,’” she said.
Texting about sex made her feel “really weird,” she said. “I thought he made me feel special, before the sexual stuff.”
The friendship developed into a sexual relationship in October or November.
“Well, we were in his bedroom and so I was laying down,” Girl No. 1 testified. “He came in and laid with me. At first we were hugging, and after that ... he started undressing me and told me to take off my panties and he undressed himself and took off his boxers...”
The girl said she thought she had at least three drinks made of vodka and Cherry 7-UP before they had sexual intercourse the first time.
“I let him because I was really scared,” she said. “... I didn’t know what was going on. I believe, like, I was a little intoxicated.”
The girl said that she sneaked out of her home to meet with Magallanez.
She described another incident around Thanksgiving 2006 when she was at ƒ house and four other boys were present. One was her boyfriend, another was a classmate, a third she knew by first-name only, and the fourth boy she could not identify.
They had smoked marijuana and were drinking, she said.
“I didn’t feel so great because of all the alcohol I had,” she said. “They turned on some music, so I started dancing. ... I just started doing it because I was pretty drunk.”
She said the males told her to take off her clothes, and she said she gave a “lap dance” to the boy who was her classmate.
Later, she said, she had sex with her boyfriend and two of the other boys.
“Did you have sex with Manuel?” Aranda asked.
“Later on, after everybody else was done,” the girl responded.
She said that she heard Magallanez tell her boyfriend “Why don’t you tell your girlfriend to have sex with (the third boy), too.”
She and the defendant also had a sexual encounter in his car, she said.
Her testimony ended the session for the day. She is scheduled to resume testimony Monday morning at 9 a.m.
Earlier in the afternoon, a family member Girl No. 2 lives with testified that she had brought the girl into her home in late December 2004.
The family member testified that the girl’s father is dead and that the situation among the girl, her mother and stepfather was not good. As a result, the woman moved the girl to Emporia with her. She said she believed that the absence of fathering had caused a problem for the girl.
“I knew she was susceptible of being taken advantage of,” the woman said. “She was always looking for a man, that kind of companionship. She wanted that.”
She said the girl had seemed to do well enough at Emporia Middle School, though there were some problems then. She thought “we were making some headway” at the beginning of her freshman year at Emporia High School. However, a few months later, she noticed a change and that the girl had different friends.
“I tried to intervene so that she wouldn’t become involved with those kids...,” the woman said.
The girl sometimes did not go to school, or sometimes left school during the day. The woman testified that the erratic behavior began about the same time as the girl met Magallanez.
The woman said that sometimes the girl came home past her 10 p.m. curfew and “sometimes she wouldn’t come home until morning. ... She wouldn’t tell me exactly who she was with.”
She checked the girl’s cell phone and read sexually oriented messages from Magallanez to the girl. She took away the girl’s cell phone twice for varying periods of time.
“The text messages I found disturbing were from Manuel,” the woman said. “It was saved under ‘Manuel’ in her phone.”
She also learned that Girl No. 2 had a MySpace page and was using Yahoo! Messenger to communicate with Magallanez and her friends.
She moved the computer from the girl’s bedroom into an area off the living room and protected it with a password to prevent the girl from logging on when the woman was not present.
Because she still has not been given legal guardianship of the girl, she has been unable to get the girl into therapy.
“I had wanted to put her into therapy before that,” the woman said.
In December 2006, the woman learned what had been happening in the girl’s life, though she said she still did not have all of the details.
Emporia Police Detective Sgt. Mark Schondelmaier had spent Friday morning on the witness stand, describing police procedures and talking about his role in interviews conducted with alleged victims .
Schondelmaier had been in charge of an investigation that resulted in Magallanez’s arrest and conviction for promoting obscenities to a minor. The charge stemmed from Magallanez’s taking a 14-year-old girl to the Whispers store, where she purchased a vibrator and warming lotion with money given to her by Magallanez.
Schondelmaier said that he had not been the primary detective in the current cases against Magallanez, but assisted sometimes in the investigation headed by Detective Lisa Sage. He was part of a team at the Child Advocacy Center at SOS in late 2006 and early 2007 when the young teens in the current trial were interviewed about their relationships with the defendant. He operated a video recorder during the interviews and acted as consultant to Angela D. Proehl, special investigator with Children and Family Services Division of the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. Proehl often is called to the CAC to conduct forensic-type interviews with youngsters who may be victims of sexual abuse and other offenses.
The detective answered many questions about police procedures on interviews, investigations, and search warrants.
When questioned by County Attorney Marc Goodman about the search for a videotape alleged to contain incriminating footage of Magallanez, the underaged girl and her boyfriend, Schondelmaier explained why he had chosen to use a cooperating individual, or CI, to help get the tape.
Schondelmaier said that one of the girls told him she believed that a relative of Magallanez was keeping the tape. The girl told him she thought she might be able to get the tape.
“I didn’t feel that I had enough information at that point to get a search warrant,” Schondelmaier said. “Since she was involved with the tape, I think it would be reasonable to most people ... for (her) to be asking about it ... and somebody wouldn’t necessarily think the police were involved.”
He said that the tape “would be very good evidence that a crime had been committed and who was involved in the crime.”
Under cross-examination, Schondelmaier said that he had chosen not to do a “knock-and-talk” interview with the relative alleged to have the tape.
“If I were to do a knock-and-talk, if I would go to (his) house as a police officer and ask him about the video, if he knew where the video was and I didn’t get it right then, he could tell whoever had the video, or if he had it himself, the video could end up being destroyed ... because the police were asking about the video,” he explained.
The girl was unsuccessful in obtaining the video, which remains a missing piece of evidence for the trial.
Comments
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Posted by madpoet (anonymous) on August 18, 2007 at 9:50 a.m. (Suggest removal)
This whole thing is just sick! To think a man in his 30s would seduce little girls with alcohol and drugs. Yeah, I know innocent until proven guilty but I doubt they'd have gone to trial without being darn sure they had a solid case. Makes you wonder how many perverts are out there. SCARY!
Posted by paxsona (anonymous) on August 20, 2007 at 5:13 p.m. (Suggest removal)
He is a sick dude. I use to work with him at McDonalds
Posted by UserName (anonymous) on August 21, 2007 at 5:37 p.m. (Suggest removal)
What's worse? What these girls went through or making them describe the details to a bunch of strangers in court?
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