A 33-year-old Comfort resident, Andres Cervantes, was found not guilty by a jury of his peers last week for the charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14 years of age.
Cervantes was arrested in 2020 after a high school senior reported he had sexually abused her when she was 11 years old, saying the incident occurred more than once.
The accuser’s outcry came to light when she tested positive for marijuana during a school-administered drug test. This was a point Cervantes’ defense attorney, Alberto Garcia, was quick to bring before the jury, suggesting the now 20-yearold woman was using the accusation to alleviate the consequences of her failed drug test.
The woman accusing Cervantes participated in sports at a Boerne high school. Testing positive in a school-administered drug test is an automatic disqualification from participation in athletics at any of the Boerne Independent School District campuses, information states.
This was Garcia’s first jury trial and subsequently first jury win in roughly five years.
“The victim, Charity Smith (pseudonym), is one of the strongest victims we have had in trial,” Kendall County Assistant District Attorney Nick Socias said. “She stood up to her abuser in court and told the truth. She will be a strong advocate for survivor’s rights in the future, and I look forward to seeing the great things she will do.”
Smith – which is the pseudonym assigned to the accuser ¬– was brought before the jury and questioned early on in the three-day trial. Smith said Cervantes inappropriately touched her while she was asleep on a couch in her living room. On another occasion, Smith said Cervantes showed her a pornographic DVD cover, describing the image in detail.
However, this is where the prosecutor’s case seemed to become in question. The charge brought against Cervantes, continuous sexual abuse of a child, requires a defendant to have committed sexual abuse of a child more than once with at least 30 days in between two instances.
When Smith was brought to the stand and asked to describe the events of the day she alleged Cervantes showed her the DVD cover, she said he did not touch her inappropriately, raising questions as to whether the accusations against Cervantes met the requirements of the charge.
In a police interview in 2020, Smith had told Anita Seamans, a former special investigator with the Kendall County Sheriff’s Office, that Cervantes touched her inappropriately the day Smith alleged he showed her the DVD. However, on the stand, Smith said she felt he wanted to, but he was interrupted when her 3-year-old sister entered the room.
This was a point of contradiction the defense was quick to note, eventually motioning outside the presence of the jury for 451st District Court Judge Kirsten Cohoon to issue a direct verdict of not guilty, saying Socias failed to meet the requirements set for continuous sexual abuse of a child. Cohoon denied Garcia’s motion.
A lynchpin in the defense’s case was what seemed to be a taped confession by Cervantes to an investigator after Cervantes failed a voluntary polygraph test. While the polygraph and its results were barred from mention in front of the jury, Socias pulled clips from the post-polygraph interview where Cervantes seemingly admits to committing the crime.
However, Cervantes spoke Spanish, requiring an English transcript of the interview to be compiled by the court translator for the jury, but the key questions and responses in Socias’ clips were inexplicably conducted in English. During witness testimony, it was also discovered the investigator had no certification qualifying him as a Spanish speaker, and he said he was a “conversational speaker.”
After a long deliberation from the jury Wednesday morning, the 451st District Court seats were filled again early Wednesday afternoon as it was announced the jury had come to a verdict.
Cohoon read the jury’s not guilty verdict, confirming it was unanimous. The judge then asked Cervantes to stand once more, informing the once defendant he had been acquitted of the charge brought against him and he was free to leave the courtroom.
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