A 30-year-old tattoo artist pleaded guilty Friday to molesting a 14-year-old girl and multiple other felonies and was immediately sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Edder Giovani Nieves-Vera, who was previously deported after serving three years for child annoyance in Murrieta in 2004, was arrested in January 2013 after he'd lured two 14-year-old girls to his Mission Viejo home with promises of drugs, alcohol and free tattoos.
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The parents of the girl who was molested found out about it and contacted the Orange County Sheriff's Department on Dec. 21, 2012. Nieves-Vera had originally hooked up with the girl via Facebook, so members of the Orange County Child Exploitation Task Force posed as her online to arrange a meeting so the tattoo artist could finish his, uh, work.
But when he showed up for that meeting at Dana Point Harbor, he was greeted by investigators who handcuffed him.
Nieves-Vera pleaded guilty to: three counts of meeting a minor to commit lewd conduct; and one count each of lewd acts on a child 14 or 15, child annoyance, luring a child with intent to commit a specified crime, annoying or molesting a child younger than 18 with a specified prior conviction, inducing a minor to buy or sell a controlled substance, statutory rape, soliciting a minor to buy or sell a controlled substance, exhibition of lewd materials to a minor, possession or control of child pornography and forgery of public or corporate
seals, all felonies. He also copped to 17 misdemeanor counts of tattooing a minor.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.