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Former airport manager to be jailed for sex crime |
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Wednesday, 09 July 2008 |
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By Darcy Ellis
Editor 7-3-2008
A former Inyo County employee accused of sexually assaulting a Bishop woman in 1999 has been convicted in another county of a similar crime, this time against a child.
Ralph Escudero, manager of Bishop Airport from April of 1994 to Dec. 31, 1999, will be sentenced July 17 in El Dorado County Superior Court on one count of committing lewd and lascivious acts against a child under 14.
He faces three, six or eight years in prison, said Deputy District Attorney Dale Gomes, who intends to push for the maximum amount of jail time.
At one point, the D.A.’s Office offered Escudero the opportunity to plead guilty – with nothing specific offered in return – to the charge he was eventually convicted of, but Escudero opted for the jury trial. He did not take the stand to testify on his own behalf.
Escudero’s June 18 conviction came a day after the trial began and at least two of his alleged former victims, not including the child under 14, did take the witness stand.
Among them was the woman who came forward in 1999 in Inyo County to file charges of sexual assault against Escudero. Those charges led to a jury trial in 2000 that ended with a hung jury – something the woman, a former FedEx courier who met Escudero through her job at the airport, found not only hard to swallow but rife with ramifications in a small town susceptible to rampant “he said/she said” speculation.
“There was that, ‘Did it happen, or didn’t it?’” recalled the woman, who asked not to be identified. “You know Bishop, how the rumor mill works. I was sort of an outsider because I was new to the area, and Ralph had been there a lot longer than I had.
“That’s why I left Bishop,” she said of the hung jury and difficulty in showing her face around town after she made the allegations against Escudero. “No one else had ever filed any charges against him …”
Including, according to Gomes, several other women who also testified at Escudero’s trial about witnessing “suspicious behavior” on his part.
One of those women, who still resides in Bishop and also asked not to be identified, testified to spending an evening with Escudero in which she believes he spiked her drink with some sort of narcotic. She said she awoke in the morning to find him forcing himself upon her while his wife was asleep in another room of the house.
Both that woman and the former FedEx courier say they are relieved by the jury’s decision in Placerville. The latter woman, in particular, said she feels “vindicated.”
What she didn’t say, but indicated, was that had there been a conviction in Inyo County in 2000, the child in El Dorado County would not have been victimized.
According to Gomes, Escudero moved to Placerville not long after the trial – and his employment – here in Inyo County ended. He began dating a woman and it is her daughter he was convicted of molesting. The “lewd and lascivious acts” are reported to have occurred between January 2002 and April of 2005. Escudero was arrested in October of 2006 after “some collateral family members” found out what had been happening to the young girl, Gomes said.
According to Gomes, it was not the first time the molestation was brought to light.
The victim “had told her mother several years before and she never reported it,” Gomes said.
Gomes said he does not know if the victim is undergoing any type of counseling.
At this point, with Escudero’s sentencing approaching in two weeks, the former FedEx courier said she is considering revisiting charges against Escudero for the alleged 1999 assault if it means keeping him behind bars longer than eight years.
Even if it means testifying for a third time.
“It makes you feel dirty being on the witness stand (reliving those events),” she said. “You’re not only being assaulted all over again, but you’re being assaulted in a room full of people.”
At least one other individual who wouldn’t mind additional jail time for Escudero is Gomes.
Given Escudero’s history and a string of women with similar stories of near-assaults at Escudero’s hands, Gomes said he considers the man a “danger to society.”
When Escudero is released from jail, he’ll have to contend with a more official label – that of “registered sex offender.”
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 05 August 2008 )
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