Almost had this one slip through the cracks because of the Huntington Beach crap: A 47-year-old Santa Ana gang banger, who used pornography, methamphetamine and gang intimidation to prep a 15-year-old boy to have sex with him four times, was convicted last week of sexually assaulting the boy.
Jerry Ayala was found guilty after about four hours of jury deliberations.
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Ayala was convicted of four counts of sodomy of a victim younger than 16, two counts of oral copulation of a victim younger than 16, and a count of distributing pornography to a minor, all felonies. But as Paul Anderson reports for City News Service, prosecutors dropped sexual assault counts related to another alleged victim of Ayala because the underage teenage boy is a parolee at-large who fears the gang member and won't testify.
The 15-year-old victim grew up in Santa Ana near Ayala and knew him for many years. Around Christmas 2008, the teen went to Ayala's home to get marijuana, but Ayala gave the boy meth to smoke instead. The teen had no experience with methamphemtamine nor what Ayala tried to lay on him next: his manmeat.
The boy resisted, but Ayala told him to “relax” and showed him some heterosexual porn on a television to get the teen aroused. Ayala then had the boy fuck him in the ass. That would make the boy vomit and return home “embarrassed and scared,” according to prosecutors, who told jurors the teen returned to Ayala's residence in February 2009, and the same type of sexual assault happened again.
Ayala would blow the boy twice in April 2009. When the boy tried to leave the second time, Ayala blocked his path, forcing the teen to jump out of a window. The teen later wound up in Juvenile Hall for crank calling 9-1-1 and bringing a knife to school for protection. While there nurses did a blood test on him and discovered he had a sexually transmitted disease. The teen then told authorities about the encounters with Ayala.
Raul Ramirez, who represented Ayala through the Orange County Alternate Defender's
Office, told jurors the teen was a liar, calling this “a he-said, he-said case.'' The jury obviously disagreed. Ayala could get 10 years in prison at his Aug. 23 sentencing.
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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.