Guilty

After two days of arguments and several hours of deliberation, a jury found a Comfort man, 46-yearold Jose Jimenez, guilty of indecency with a child, which was the lesser charge tied into charges of continuous sexual abuse of a child.

While Jimenez was facing 25 years to life in prison on his first-degree felony charges, he will be sentenced between two and 20 years for the second-degree indecency felony after the jury handed down its initial verdict on Wednesday afternoon.

During the trial, three victims were interviewed and all three accused Jimenez of sexually assaulting them at various times and ages. One victim accused Jimenez of assaulting her for a couple of years, beginning when she was about 10 years old, another accused him of assaulting her during a car ride when she was 14 years old and the last witness accused him of assaulting her during a party when she was about 5 years old.

“This is not Hollywood. There is no script for this,” Assistant Criminal District Attorney Nick Socias told the jury in his opening statements. “These are kids. I can’t tell you how these kids are going to act. I don’t know if they’re going to cry. I don’t know if they’re going to have no emotion. I don’t know if they’re going to laugh. I don’t know if they’re going to curl up in a ball. But what the evidence will show you is not a single one of them wants to be here today. They didn’t choose to be here.”

All the victims were related to Jimenez in some distant way, and varying levels of emotional grief were displayed from the stand during their testimonies.

During the trial, accusations of grooming were made by Socias, who brought to the stand Dr. Lawrence Thompson, integrated health services director at Harris County Resources for Children and Adults, as an expert witness.

The victims all recalled some form of gift-giving associated with the alleged acts of abuse, from a Rubik’s cube used to barter the duration of one alleged incident to buying a teenager alcohol before an alleged assault. Thompson, without knowing the details of the case as an expert, defined grooming as any behavior a sexual perpetrator uses to win the trust of a child, including gift-giving.

The defense employed several arguments against the accusations made against Jimenez, including jealousy, missing evidence and questioning the timing of the victims’ outcries.

At the crux of one of these arguments was the Rubik’s cube, which one of the victims claimed Jimenez used to barter for sexual advances when the victim was about 5 years old. The defense attorney presented photos from the party this was alleged to occur, showing the child without the toy which raised the question as to where it had gone.

While not one of the victims, Jimenez’s ex-wife testified on behalf of the victims. During later testimony from Jimenez himself, it became clear he began a relationship with his ex-wife while she was a minor in high school after he was an adult. The two are five years apart in age, with his ex-wife being 41 and Jimenez being 46, and the two were married when Jimenez was 21. It was disclosed she was 15 and he was 19 when she became pregnant with their first child.

When asked about this age disparity by Socias, Jimenez said the two met in school. It took several lines of questioning for Jimenez to acknowledge that he was an adult while his first wife was not.

After the major points of testimony, the defense called several character witnesses to the stand who described Jimenez as a hardworking man and doting father who they described as trustworthy.

The jury was sent to review the charges and the evidence Wednesday morning, taking several hours to deliberate before handing down a conviction on the lesser charge. The sentencing process began Thursday with both the state and defense presenting additional evidence.

The jury consisted of 11 white men and one woman middle age or older.

During the trial, three victims were interviewed and all three accused Jose Jimenez of sexually assaulting them at various times and ages.