Seven years and still waiting, a victim of sexual assault from San Antonio grapples with the enduring pain and injustice, rooted firmly in a system that proved itself deficient. In an account relayed to FOX San Antonio, the woman, who was just 14 when first abused, reveals the continuous harassment by her abuser, which has escalated to receiving explicit images of her assault on Snapchat, taunting the scars that the system's failure has left etched on her life.
The cogs of justice stumbled and stalled from the outset; a detective from the San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) got fired for bungling 130 sexual assault cases, one of these missteps sabotaged the path to justice for this particular victim, her abuser remains out of the reach of law, enjoying a freedom she's long been denied. "I met him on Instagram. I told him I was 14 at the time he was 23. He said age was just a number and he was okay with it. He would go to my middle school and eat lunch with me, he would sign in as my uncle," the woman, whose identity remains protected, told FOX San Antonio in an interview reflecting a chilling narrative of grooming and abuse.
After running away in 2017 to live with the man, her parents reached out to SAPD, trusting the system to intervene. Instead, her case languished on the desk of Kenneth Valdez, the same detective whose subsequent termination for mismanaging cases signified a deeper rot. Even after reassignment of the mishandled cases, "All of the mishandled cases were reassigned and investigated appropriately, except three or four because of the statute of limitations," an SAPD official claimed, yet this did not translate into justice for the now 22-year-old mother of two, who accuses the subsequent detective and prosecutor of dropping the ball again leading to a grand jury's decision not to indict in 2020.
A correspondence with the Bexar County Criminal District Attorney's Office obtained by FOX San Antonio asserted the case's proper handling, stating, "The Bexar County Criminal District Attorney’s Office maintains great respect for all alleged victims of crime and understands that victimization is a traumatic experience." Yet respect and understanding hold little weight against the woman's reality, compelled to share children with the very man she claims groomed and raped her from childhood, and who now imbues her days with dread through digital ghosts of her past abuse.
