A California elementary college janitor was wrongfully locked up in jail for 5 years after a “mentally in poor health girl” and “self-confessed opioid addict” lied to cops that he was raping younger youngsters, a brand new lawsuit claims.
Pedro Martinez, now 55, was working because the custodian at Maple Elementary College close to Bakersfield when he was immediately arrested and slapped with a slew of kid sexual assault prices in 2019.
The janitor spent the following few years behind bars till he was ultimately acquitted on all counts in December 2023 — however not earlier than being “publicly humiliated,” “demonized” and wrongfully “labeled a baby molester,” in response to the swimsuit filed in California’s District Courtroom earlier this week.
The saga first erupted after a lady claimed to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division in 2019 that Martinez had allegedly raped her girlfriend’s 6-year-old boy, the criticism states.
The lady alleged, too, that the janitor had “collected a number of kids for group rapes that passed off each day each Monday by Thursday over a a number of month interval,” in response to the submitting.
Martinez claims that regardless of having no laborious proof, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division investigators and prosecutors began constructing a case towards Martinez by relying solely on the lady’s “absurd and fantastical claims.”
In keeping with the swimsuit, Martinez’s accuser was mentally in poor health and “a self-confessed opioid addict with a legal historical past who had repeatedly made a number of extraordinarily comparable allegations towards others.”
The lady’s “allegations have been so inconceivable and fantastical that any prudent individual or regulation enforcement officer would have investigated her background to find out their veracity fairly than take her phrase at face worth,” the submitting states.
Nonetheless, Martinez — who in response to the swimsuit had by no means even had a parking ticket — was arrested in January 2019 and hit with 11 counts of kid intercourse abuse.
He was then “compelled to endure virtually 5 years of incarceration” till the fees have been tossed following a legal trial in December final yr, the swimsuit states.
Regardless of the acquittal, Martinez argued within the swimsuit that the “harm had been carried out.”
“Mr Martinez has been ostracized from his group and suffers, naturally, the deep emotional misery that may naturally come up from such a horrible, avoidable, offensive, and constitutionally abusive tragedy,” the criticism states.
The lawsuit — filed towards the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Workplace, the district legal professional’s workplace and different county officers — is looking for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
The Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division declined to touch upon the swimsuit, citing the pending litigation.
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