MTA Driver Pleads Guilty to Molesting Boys

An MTA bus driver pleaded guilty Monday to a molesting a teenage boy aboard his bus and to sexually assaulting a police officer and his brother when they were minors two decades ago.

Clasping his hands in front of his face as if praying, Anthony Zaragoza, 49, entered guilty pleas to a dozen felony counts under a deal that will see him sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison.

The 325-pound bus driver seemed a pale shadow of the man portrayed as a sexual predator by prosecutors as he sat with his eyes often shut and replied “yes” as Deputy Dist. Atty. Christina Weiss read the felony counts. The charges included lewd conduct with a minor, attempted forced oral copulation and false imprisonment.

Zaragoza at one point tried to plead no contest, but was rebuffed by the prosecutor who told him the plea agreement required a guilty plea.

Los Angeles Superior Judge Craig Veals told him the plea amounted to the same as no contest and at one point asked if the bus driver understood the proceeding. “I understand what is going on,” said Zaragoza, glancing at the audience. Under state law, he will serve at least 19 years of the sentence.

“I know for the next 20 years, young boys will be safe from a creep like him,” said a 33-year-old man who, along with his brother, now a police officer, was molested by Zaragoza in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “I was very pleased with the sentence, but it will never take away what I lost,” the man said.

Weiss said the plea was fair. “He faced more than 43 years in prison. This is a guy who I had on tape committing one of the crimes and confessing to the others in an interview. He knew he’d get the maximum if it went to trial,” Weiss said.

“This man was a coward from beginning to end, and he hid his face out of shame,” she said, referring to how Zaragoza held his hands in front of his face during the proceeding.

A father of three, Zaragoza was a Little League coach, a football coach and a Big Brother, often mentoring students, authorities said. But he was also convicted in the 1980s of felony robbery.

The Quartz Hill resident was arrested last year after molesting a 15-year-old North Carolina boy on his Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus. The boy was visiting an uncle in Pasadena when he took the bus to Hollywood last June and captured the incident on videotape.

With the camera pointing down, the boy pressed the “on” button after Zaragoza began to talk to him about sex. The bus driver is heard trying to persuade the boy to engage in sex as the boy protests. “I could pin you to the floor and take your pants off without you stopping me,” Zaragoza said. “But I wouldn’t hurt you, sweetheart.”

After Zaragoza fondled him, the boy escaped by promising to come back the next day. In a taped interview with detectives, Zaragoza admitted touching the North Carolina teenager and other boys “two or three times,” calling it a “sporadic thing.”

Shortly after Zaragoza’s arrest, the police officer and his brother came forward. As a 13-year-old in 1979, the officer with his 11-year-old brother met Zaragoza, and he became a family friend and the boys’ godfather.

The officer testified at a preliminary hearing that on one overnight stay at Zaragoza’s home, Zaragoza forced the boy to touch him below the waist.

The younger brother testified that he was molested by Zaragoza the first day they met, in April 1979, and at least eight other times at various locations, from a Montebello transit station to a Motel 6.

Zaragoza was convicted in 1980 of felony robbery and sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation.

In 1988, he used a state law that allows defendants convicted of a felony and not given a state prison sentence the right to have their conviction reduced to a misdemeanor. He also succeeded in getting that conviction expunged from his record in January 1989.

The MTA’s predecessor, the Southern California Rapid Transit District, knew of Zaragoza’s conviction when it hired him as a part-time driver in February 1989.

But MTA officials said that since the criminal record had been expunged, it technically did not exist, and the agency could not, under state law, deny him employment because of it.