A California elementary college janitor was wrongfully locked up in jail for 5 years after a “mentally ill woman” 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 out of the blue arrested and slapped with a slew of kid sexual assault expenses 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 child molester,” in response to the go well with filed in California’s District Court docket earlier this week.
The saga first erupted after a girl claimed to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division in 2019 that Martinez had allegedly raped her girlfriend’s 6-year-old boy, the grievance states.
The girl alleged, too, that the janitor had “collected multiple children for group rapes that took place on a daily basis every Monday through Thursday over a several month period,” 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 in opposition to Martinez by relying solely on the girl’s “absurd and fantastical claims.”
In response to the go well with, Martinez’s accuser was mentally sick and “a self-confessed opioid addict with a criminal history who had repeatedly made multiple extremely similar allegations against others.”
The girl’s “allegations were so impossible and fantastical that any prudent person or law enforcement officer would have investigated her background to determine their veracity rather than take her word at face value,” the submitting states.
Nonetheless, Martinez — who in response to the go well with 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 “forced to suffer almost five years of incarceration” till the costs have been tossed following a legal trial in December final 12 months, the go well with states.
Regardless of the acquittal, Martinez argued within the go well with that the “damage had been done.”
“Mr Martinez has been ostracized from his community and suffers, naturally, the deep emotional distress that would naturally arise from such a horrible, avoidable, offensive, and constitutionally abusive tragedy,” the grievance states.
The lawsuit — filed in opposition to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Workplace, the district lawyer’s workplace and different county officers — is searching for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
The Bernardino County Sheriff’s Division declined to touch upon the go well with, citing the pending litigation.
