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Boys Tell of Molestation by Official at School

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Special To The Times

Two 15-year-old boys from Virgil Middle School said in court Wednesday that the director of the gang intervention program at their school provided them with drugs, alcohol and pornographic videos, then sexually molested them at his apartment.

Willie Martinez, 41, pleaded not guilty at his earlier arraignment to three counts of oral copulation with a minor and one count of sodomy with a minor.

Martinez is the schools’s director for the L.A. Bridges program, the $11.2-million effort the city launched last fall to reduce gang involvement, strengthen families and improve academic achievement by creating “bridges” to a variety of public and private organizations in the city.

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At Martinez’s preliminary hearing at the Los Angeles Municipal Court, four teenage boys described parties at the defendant’s Echo Park apartment where adolescents allegedly took speed, smoked pot and drank alcohol until they passed out.

The teenagers alleged that the incidents occurred between January and June, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Meister.

One of the 15-year-old boys said he moved in with Martinez for a week when his mother threatened to send him back to his native Guatemala. After a night of partying with other L.A. Bridges participants from the school, he said, Martinez took the other boy home and then sodomized him.

“This doesn’t make us gay,” Martinez was quoted as telling the youth. He did not immediately return to his mother’s house in Hollywood, he said, because he had no money for bus fare.

Another 15-year-old boy wiped tears from his eyes as he said that Martinez showed him a pornographic movie, had oral sex with him, then took him out for a hamburger before driving him home.

Two 14-year-old witnesses, also from Virgil, said they had partied at Martinez’s apartment but were never sexually propositioned by him.

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At the end of the preliminary hearing, Martinez was bound over for trial. A trial date will be set at his Superior Court arraignment July 29.

The allegations against Martinez arose during a gang-related homicide investigation, when one of the accusers told detectives that he had been sexually assaulted, Det. Marty Herrera said.

She refused to state the nature of the boy’s involvement in the on-going homicide investigation, other than to say he was neither a suspect nor a witness.

“The Martinez name came up apparently because the boy was tired of the abuse and wanted it stopped, and finally someone was there to listen to him,” Det. Cleo Maria Guevara, of the Los Angeles Police Department’s sexually exploited child unit, said.

Martinez was arrested at 3 a.m. June 30 at his apartment, and a search of his home turned up “pornographic materials and narcotics,” she said.

Martinez is being held at the Los Angeles County Jail in lieu of $400,000 bail. If convicted, he faces a maximum of five years in a state prison, Meister said.

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