If adults had been paying close attention to Demetrio Elizarras Blanco, they may have been alerted that the 36-year-old man attracted young neighborhood boys to his Fairview Street apartment in Santa Ana with his PlayStation and electronic equipment.
But they didn't and Blanco repeatedly forced a six-year-old boy, identified only as “G.V.” in court records, to orally copulate him.
The man also stripped the boy and sodomized him on numerous occasions.
When eventually confronted by police, Blanco admitted only that he'd hugged G.V., but prosecutors inside the Orange County District Attorney's office and a 2010 jury believed otherwise.
The defendant found himself paying a steep price for his sex crimes, fought his convictions at a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana and lost.
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He then sought relief from a federal judge by claiming that there had been “insufficient evidence” to find him guilty and his trial judge had improperly blocked the thorough cross-examination of a key witness.
According to Blanco, the boy can't be believed because he provided inconsistent statements about incidents.
But this month, U.S. District Court Judge Beverly Reid O'Connell accepted a magistrate judge's report that reviewed the child molester's complaints and determined either they were weak or didn't qualify for federal action.
Upshot: Blanco, now 42, will continue to serve his 25 years to life sentence inside Ironwood State Prison in Blythe.
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Email: rs**********@oc******.com. Twitter: @RScottMoxley.
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.