When he was 22-years old, Anaheim's Lyle Aaron Liwanag visited a friend's house to repeatedly molest the man's 10-year-old niece and her 13-year-old cousin.
Liwanag's method was to get close to the girls under fraudulently innocent pretenses and move his hands to fondle their breasts and vaginas, according to court records.
When the girls protested, he'd say he was “just chilling.”
Molesting kids wasn't new at that time to this 5-foot-5 and 195-pound defendant.
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In 2008, Liwanag met a 15-year-old Washington girl and eventually lured her to visit him for three days at an Anaheim hotel, where they had intercourse, according to court records.
The visit ended the defendant's arrest, six sex crime convictions at a 2012 jury trial and then punishment by Superior Court Judge Daniel J. Didier.
But Liwanag appealed on two points. He claimed the prosecutor committed misconduct during the closing argument and he said he'd been cheated out of 50 days of pre-sentencing jail credit.
A three-justice panel at the California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana this month considered the arguments and didn't entirely dismiss them.
He was award the time credit to reduce his prison punishment, but the justices declared that the misconduct claim, which they called unavailing, was technically barred for consideration because the defense lawyer did not object at the trial.
Upshot: Liwanag, now 25, will continue to serve his 15 years to life sentence inside the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.