A California elementary school janitor was wrongly locked up in prison for five years after lying to a police officer that a “mentally ill woman” and “self-proclaimed opioid addict” was raping young children, a new lawsuit says. claims.
Pedro Martinez, now 55, was working as a custodian at Maple Elementary School near Bakersfield when he was suddenly arrested in 2019 and charged with numerous child sexual assaults.
The custodian spent the next few years in prison and was finally acquitted of all charges in December 2023, but was subsequently subjected to “public humiliation” and “public humiliation,” according to a lawsuit filed in California District Court. She said she was “vilified” and unfairly “labeled a child molester.” The case was heard in court earlier this week.
The dispute first erupted in 2019 after a woman complained to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department that she suspected Martinez of raping her girlfriend's 6-year-old boy, according to the complaint.
The woman also alleged that the caretaker “collected multiple children for gang rapes that occurred every Monday through Thursday every week for several months,” according to the filing.
Martinez claims that San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department investigators and prosecutors began building a case against her based solely on the woman's “absurd and fanciful allegations,” despite a lack of solid evidence. I am doing it.
Martinez's accuser suffers from mental illness, “self-identified as an opioid addict with a criminal record, and repeatedly made very similar allegations against others,” according to the complaint.
The woman's “claims are so impossible and fanciful that any sensible person or law enforcement officer would look into her background to determine their veracity, rather than take her word at face value.” We would have investigated,” the filing states.
Still, Martinez, who didn't even have a parking ticket, according to the lawsuit, was arrested in January 2019 and charged with 11 counts of child sexual abuse.
He was then “forced to spend nearly five years in prison,” the complaint says, before the charges were dropped after a criminal trial last December.
Despite his acquittal, Martinez argued in his lawsuit that “the damage has been done.”
“Mr. Martinez has been ostracized from his community and is suffering the deep emotional distress that would naturally result from such a horrific, avoidable, offensive, and constitutionally abusive tragedy,” the complaint states. There is.
The lawsuit, filed against the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office, District Attorney's Office and other county officials, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
The Bernardino County Sheriff's Office declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing the pending litigation.
