Jurors had to decide Monday in state District Court in Santa Fe whether two Santa Fe men were the victims of an elaborate ruse or the culprits in a brutal kidnapping and rape of an Española woman.
The facts of the case are as follows: the alleged victim’s boyfriend, Stephen Martinez, received text and phone messages from her early the morning of March 28 suggesting she had been kidnapped. Martinez found her rental unit at Santa Clara Apartments in disarray, with notes to him saying she was hiding in the bathroom while “they” rummaged through her stuff, took her phone and put her in fear for her life. Martinez knew “they” were Herman Flores Jr., 23, and his father Herman Flores Sr., 45.
Martinez called police, who tracked the victim to an RV on Los Pinos Road in Santa Fe belonging to the Flores family. When a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s deputy conducted a welfare check on the victim, she was lying in bed with Flores Jr. She said she was not taken against her will, and inquired who reported her missing, the deputy testified. Both she and Flores Jr. were transported to Española. Later that day the victim was taken to St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, where a sexual assault exam confirmed that she’d had sex but was unable to determine whether it was consensual. She told police it wasn’t. Meanwhile, Flores Jr. was arrested and charged with rape, kidnapping, conspiracy (with his father) to commit kidnapping, and burglary. Flores Sr. was later arrested on charges of kidnapping and conspiracy.
Flores Jr.’s defense attorney, Sidney West, didn’t review each of the charges with the jury during her closing statement Monday afternoon. Instead, she said it was an “all or nothing” case hinging completely on whether the jury believed the victim.
The victim herself sat in the front row of the gallery during prosecutor Joe CampBell’s closing statement, holding hands with Martinez and wiping her eyes as CampBell described her alleged ordeal.
“Ask yourselves,” CampBell told the jury, “Why on God’s green Earth would any woman subject herself to the things she has subjected herself to in this case — why would a victim come in here and make that stuff up if it wasn’t true?”
Over nearly two days of the four-day trial that ran from Nov. 24 until Monday, the victim described how she originally was traded to Flores Jr. by her brother in exchange for drugs, and came to stay at the Floreses’ trailer for approximately two months beginning in September 2007. In October 2007, Flores Jr. was arrested for drunk driving and incarcerated in Luna County, but the victim continued to be held hostage by Flores Sr. and his mother, Lillian Salcido, until she was able to escape and return to her adoptive parents’ home in Española, the victim testified. No charges were ever filed for the alleged hostage situation.
On March 27, Flores Jr. was released from prison and immediately called and texted the victim, saying he missed her and he wanted back a jacket she’d taken. According to the victim, the two argued about the jacket over the phone, and several hours later, some time between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m., the victim was awakened by a knock on her apartment door.
Flores Jr. and his father barged into her apartment, the victim testified, and while Flores Sr. told his son to quiet the girl, she hurled everything from plates to softball trophies at the pair before escaping to the bathroom. There the victim penned two rambling, grammatically incorrect letters to Martinez on an envelope and a ripped-out magazine page, written in red Sharpie pen and glittery green makeup. Meanwhile, both Flores men allegedly packed several plastic garbage bags full of clothes, shoes and toiletries for her that were later examined and photographed by police.
Among the items that the Floreses allegedly packed were an Epilady hair removal device, an orthodontic retainer, shampoo and toothpaste, according to photographs entered into evidence.
According to the woman’s testimony, the defendants forced the victim into Flores Sr.’s truck, where she was ordered to lie down out of sight in the back seat, next to Flores Jr. Both Floreses and Flores Sr.’s friend Heather Acker joked that Flores Jr. had been in jail awhile and needed to “get some,” the victim claimed. At the same time, the victim was able to send frantic text messages to Martinez updating him on her plight (she believed she was riding in a diesel truck in the direction of Deming) without the Floreses noticing.
Back in Santa Fe, Flores Jr, allegedly raped her in the truck after his father and Ackers got out, the victim testified. The details of the rape varied depending on when the victim was telling the story — her testimony in court, her original statement to Espanola Police Sgt. Christian Lopez, or her statement to the sexual assault nurse. In one version, the victim screamed for her life and punched and kicked Flores Jr., and in another she complied willingly, feeling resistance was futile. In some statements, the rape lasted only five minutes or as long as 30 minutes. In two of her statements, Flores Jr. bit her on the inside of her thigh, but in the third, he did not.
Flores Jr. then allegedly threatened the victim not to make him look bad in front of his grandmother. So the two slept together in the RV until they were awakened by police the following morning. Before Flores Jr.’s grandmother opened the door to the officer, Flores Jr. allegedly told the victim that if she told police what had happened he would kill her, the officer and anyone else he deemed necessary.
The state didn’t present evidence of the more sensational accusation that had originally brought the case national media attention — that the victim first came to live with the Floreses as part of a drug trade. The defense, however, did elicit this and other lurid details, such as the victim’s assertion that her adoptive family burned her with a curling iron and gave her bad haircuts, in order to undermine her credibility.
On the stand, the victim couldn’t say exactly when or from whom she learned that her living arrangement with the Floreses was part of a drug trade, and admitted she and her brother were homeless when the Floreses took them in after her older sister kicked them out. During the time she was allegedly held hostage in 2007, the victim made visits to her sister’s house unsupervised by any of the Floreses, according to statements made in court. Her sister testified that the victim described Flores Jr. as her boyfriend, although the victim testified she never had sex with Flores Jr. before the alleged rape.
Scott Irving, a friend of Flores Jr. who watched most of the trial, told the SUN he observed the victim “just chilling” with Flores Jr. both in Santa Fe and at his home in White Rock, where the two once visited.
“The first I heard of the hostage thing was when I read it in the paper,” Irving said. “I was like, ‘Good God, are you serious?’”
West also poked holes in the victim’s account of the kidnapping. Would two grown men stand around while a woman they intended to kidnap threw every single thing out of her cabinets at them? Why were neither of them injured by the flying plates and trophies? Why didn’t the victim’s neighbors at Santa Clara Apartments hear any screaming?
State Police agent Joe Schiel told the SUN the abduction scene appeared staged.
“When somebody’s really throwing stuff around, I’d expect to see more damage,” Schiel said. “The only damage was one broken plate. For this terrible struggle to have taken place, it just didn’t match up with what you’d expect.”
Mishandled
Evidence
Neither Schiel nor any other law enforcement agent was called by the state to testify in the case. Det. Bryan Martinez, who lacked direct knowledge of the case’s details, sat with the prosecution for the entire trial and was called to the stand only for brief testimony — but by the defense.
Lopez, the case agent, was away on vacation during the trial. He was questioned over the phone by Judge Michael Vigil during a pretrial hearing the first day of trial, after questions arose concerning the handling of evidence. West had motioned for all the charges to be dismissed based on the fact that love letters written from the victim to Flores Jr. were in his father’s car when it was processed, but were never taken into evidence and then destroyed after the car was turned over to a wrecking company.
Schiel told the SUN that when he was processing Flores Sr.’s car, he saw some sort of paperwork in one of Flores Jr.s’ bags, but didn’t pay any attention to it because Española Police didn’t specify letters on the search warrant. Vigil called the ruling a “close call” but did not dismiss the charges. Instead he allowed the letters to be discussed during trial, and added a jury instruction stating how they were lost.
This was not the only instance in the case where police mishandled evidence. West told the SUN that at every pretrial conference for the case, the defense asked the state for phone records from four phones taken into evidence by Española Police. The phones belonged to the victim, Stephen Martinez, Flores Sr. and Flores Sr.’s girlfriend Tammy Leathead.
Although the phones are still in evidence, Española Police cited various reasons that call records couldn’t be retrieved from them, West said. In the end, the only record of who called whom was in recorded interviews Lopez did with Martinez, the victim and Flores Jr. During the questioning he looked at the phones and read aloud the time and contents of some text messages, West said.
One of those text messages was the most critical piece of evidence in the case, West said in her closing statement. At 7:47 a.m. March 28, the victim texted Martinez, “You should not have called police.” West argued that this, and the victim’s failure to call police throughout the alleged abduction, suggested the victim never intended law enforcement to become involved in the incident — rather, Martinez, the recipient of notes, texts and phone calls asking him to “save” her, was the intended audience.
But why, as CampBell asked the jury, would anyone conduct such an elaborate set-up?
The victim claimed that Flores Jr. not only forced her to come to Santa Fe against her will and have sex with him but also declared his intention to marry her and have children with her. They would “have a future together whether she liked it or not,” she testified.
During the pretrial hearing, defense counsel suggested that the victim was known to tell her siblings that she wanted to marry and have children with whomever she was dating. At the scene of the victim’s apartment, amid the broken plate pieces and scattered clothes were several seemingly contrived items, West noted in her closing statement. A newspaper cutout of a couple with a baby was on the floor near a photograph of Martinez. A copy of a “Married with Children” TV show DVD was left on top of a pile of clothes, and a heart-shaped card was next to an e-mail on the subject of how to avoid being abducted, West said.
When the victim was asked by West whether she had her phone with her when she was taken from the apartment, she responded yes, seeming incredulous at such a stupid question.
To forget the phone “would defeat the whole purpose of having Stephen save me,” the victim said.
“Big Brass Ones”
CampBell’s closing statement focused on discrepancies in defense testimony concerning the events of March 27 and 28. What time did Flores Sr. get back from picking up Flores Jr.? How long did it take them to eat eggs, bacon and tortillas before driving to Espanola to pick up the victim? And how did Flores Jr. have, as CampBell put it, the “big brass ones” to testify that after spending six months in jail, he “needed some affection” from a female but didn’t mean sex?
CampBell also posed a question to the female jurors.
“Ladies, I don’t know, I’m not a woman,” CampBell said. “(The victim) says she told the defendant and the defendant acknowledged she was on her period, on her cycle, she’s menstruating. And he performs oral sex on her and he and she have a consensual sexual encounter?”
If they were nervous, the defendants didn’t show signs of it during the trial or jury deliberations. They ordered green chile cheeseburgers for lunch during the trial’s third day and enthusiastically greeted Irving as they were ushered in and out of the courtroom, with what seemed to be a standard salutation among the three — saying the name of Irving’s band, Yaneva No (pronounced “ya never know”).
During the jury’s hour-long deliberations, Lillian Salcido apologized for crying as she discussed the way the case has turned her life upside down. After an Albuquerque television station covered the story of Flores Jr. allegedly trading the victim for drugs, the manager of the RV park where Salcido was living evicted her, she said. She never expected the victim to take the allegations this far, and she knows her son and “Little Herman” are innocent, Salcido said.
The victim and her boyfriend left the courtroom after CampBell’s closing statement and were not present for the verdict. Upon hearing ‘not guilty’ on all four counts, Flores Jr. collapsed in a chair and dropped his head in apparent relief. Irving, Salcido and Leathead gasped and cried as Flores Sr. stood and was likewise acquitted.
“Yaneva no!” Flores Jr exhorted Irving, as the two high-fived.
“Yaneva no,” Irving said. “Except now you do.”