Sex Charges Dropped in Home-Care Case

Orange County prosecutors, frustrated by attacks on the competency of a retarded man who was to be their star witness, agreed on Friday to dismiss charges of sexual abuse against former home-care operator Norlan Machado.

A Superior Court judge found that the witness, a 25-year-old mentally retarded man who lived in one of Machado’s facilities for 6 years, could not tell fact from fiction, making his contradiction-riddled testimony against Machado essentially useless in court.

“I am vindicated,” said Machado, 29, of Cypress. “This whole ordeal has had an extreme emotional and financial toll on my family, and we’ve been subjected to ridicule and embarrassment, distortion and false allegations.

“Hopefully, this is behind us,” he said.

Continues Civil Suit

Machado is continuing a $50-million civil suit for defamation against the Development Disabilities Center of Orange County, the watchdog agency for retarded people that in mid-1987 first raised charges of sexual abuse at the Machado home.

Machado and his mother, Maria, once jointly ran six small residential facilities for the mentally retarded in Orange and Los Angeles counties--three in Cypress and one each in Stanton, Torrance and Cerritos. They were forced to close all but the Torrance home after a state Department of Social Services investigation alleged that residents had been sexually exploited.

Maria Machado, 48, of Cypress now runs two facilities in the Los Angeles area, Norlan Machado said. He is prevented by an agreement with the state from taking any role in the operations because of the accusations against him.

Those accusations centered on Machado’s alleged coercion of several residents into performing sexual acts with him in 1985 and 1986.

Before this week, a state administrative law judge and a Municipal Court judge had each given some credence to allegations by the chief witness against Machado, finding in separate proceedings that the 25-year-old retarded man was fit to testify against Machado.

But Orange County Superior Court Judge James A. Jackman disagreed.

He found that the retarded man, who has the intelligence of a 5-year-old, was incompetent to serve as a witness, forcing the district attorney to agree to drop all criminal charges against Machado.

On Friday Jackman said: “It was a close call, but I didn’t think (the witness) could sort out any longer what, if anything, he remembered and what he had been rehearsed on.”

Social workers with the Development Disabilities Center had acknowledged in court that they had on numerous occasions reviewed with the man his accusations against Machado.

Jackman said he was also troubled by the witness’ previous reports that he had had sex with both his mother and his aunt, reports that the judge said seemed based on nothing more than “delusion and fantasy.”

“Ultimately, if Machado was to be convicted, it would have to be solely on the accusations by this man. Period. And with the questions I had about this man’s competence, I don’t think I ever could have felt comfortable with that,” Jackman said.

But, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Gannon, “I respectfully disagree with the judge’s decision. . . . We proceeded on the case because we felt that (the mentally retarded man) knew what happened to him and he knew who did it.”

Challenged Agency

Machado, who has remained silent throughout the case, said in an interview that he believes the Development Disabilities Center spurred the charges against him because he had challenged the agency’s authority and oversight of local mentally retarded people in homes.

Donald H. Graham, the administrator at the development center, said he could not respond specifically to that charge. But, he said, “Mr. Machado is entitled to his opinion.”