Did System Fail to Protect Samantha?

A jury had just come back with not-guilty verdicts on three molestation charges against Alejandro Avila. Before releasing him, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Robert G. Spitzer offered the defendant some advice.

“There was a reason that these charges were brought against you, and the jury could have come to a different decision” over whether Avila molested two 9-year-old girls in early 1999, he said.

“You want to avoid situations in the future which could result in the making of such accusations.... You should be grateful to your defense team for the work that they put in, and change your lifestyle to avoid these kind of accusations in the future.”

That was Jan. 5, 2001. Today Avila is back in custody, accused of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering 5-year-old Samantha Runnion in a case that horrified the nation.

Investigators say they are confident they have the right man. But they have yet to present any evidence, and Avila, in an interview with The Times before his arrest last week, insisted that he is innocent--in fact, that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime.

The earlier case against him, however, has become the focus of a national debate: Did the justice system fail to save Samantha?

“We ordered the case up from our archives” right after Avila’s arrest July 19, Riverside County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Soccio said. “I wanted to make sure on a personal level ... anticipating those questions: ‘Could we have done more?’ ”

Paul Dickerson, the deputy district attorney who tried the case, “is in a lot of personal pain over this,” Soccio said. “I don’t think anything could be worse for a prosecutor than to have this happen.”

In the end, Soccio concluded that his prosecutors--who last year won convictions in 98% of their child-abuse cases--did their best.

“I wouldn’t say the system failed,” Soccio said with a sigh. “But I do think that sometimes jurors reach conclusions that don’t accurately reflect what actually occurred.... I guess you have to ask those jurors what happened.”

Erin Runnion, Samantha’s mother, put it in harsher terms Thursday night in a nationally televised interview with Larry King on CNN: “I blame every juror who let him go, every juror who sat on that trial and believed this man over those little girls.”

Jurors could not be reached because their names are not kept in the public court file. But a review of hundreds of pages of trial transcripts suggests they were persuaded by Temecula defense attorney John Pozza, who focused on Avila’s repeated denials, a lack of physical evidence, and allegations that the children simply weren’t believable.

Pozza did not return telephone calls seeking comment. But in his closing arguments, he told jurors the evidence wasn’t there. “It’s very easy to get caught up in the fact that a young girl is saying these things,” Pozza told jurors, “saying stuff that is horrible, that is outrageous--[that] this guy is a monster. But you have to look at the specific little things that come out ... Was she coached? Has she been exposed to something else? We don’t know. But certainly that should lead to some doubt.

“This is very important,” he concluded. “You’ve been given one of the greatest powers that a group of people can have, and that is to determine the outcome and life of a fellow citizen.”

The bulk of the case rested on the testimony of Elizabeth Coker’s daughter. Coker dated Avila from 1996 to 1999. During the last three months of the relationship, from January to March, the girl told jurors, Avila began molesting her on weekends, when her mother, a school custodian who worked evenings, was away.

“When my mom went to work, he would take me into the room and he would do those things to me,” the girl testified.

Typically, he would order her to take off her clothes. Then he would remove his own clothing.

“Then he would start touching me and then making his private part touch mine,” the girl said.

The molestation would continue for over two hours at a time, she said, in the only bedroom of the tiny Lake Elsinore apartment her mother shared with Avila. All the while, the girl’s two older brothers sat just beyond the closed bedroom door watching television or playing video games, unaware of what was happening, the girl testified.

She rarely struggled, the girl said, because if she did he would “put his hand over my mouth and jerk me and say, ‘Don’t go. Don’t move.’ ”

“I was scared and I was just hoping it would be over soon,” she told jurors.

The girl gave a number of other detailed allegations, including the recollection that, on occasion, he made her watch pornographic films.

Afterward, she said, she didn’t tell her brothers or mother what happened, intimidated by a threat Avila made to her: “One time he threatened me and he said, ‘I would kill your mom or hurt your family.’ And that time I believed him.”

A cousin, also 9, took the stand after Coker’s daughter to report a similar story, describing times when Avila would molest her while he was baby-sitting for her mother. The cousin also said she was afraid to tell because Avila told her it was “our secret, don’t tell,” the girl testified.

It wasn’t until several months after Coker broke up with Avila that the daughter decided to tell her mother, spurred by a school friend who confided that she had been sexually abused by an uncle. That uncle, the friend told her, later went to jail. So in December 1999, she told.

“Why did you wait so long to say anything?” Dickerson asked her.

“Because I was scared still ... because he lived in the same area as my mom,” she said. “But after I told my mom I got a little over it.”

Elizabeth Coker then called police. Later, at the trial, she testified that Avila always treated her daughter with more affection than her sons. But she never suspected.

“I trusted him,” a distraught Coker testified. “I thought that he was my fiance, I was going to marry him, and I thought he would be all right watching the kids.”

Avila did not testify on his own behalf in the case, instead relying on taped interviews with detectives that prosecutors played for jurors. In the tapes, Avila repeatedly denied touching the girls in any sexual way.

“I’m not a sexual person,” Avila told authorities. “I’m not that kind of guy.”

Yes, he said, he did touch his girlfriend’s daughter in sensitive areas about a dozen times, but it was only because he often bathed her. As for the girl’s cousin, he did recall slathering lotion on a sunburn, but, again, not in a sexual way.

Jurors were never told that Avila failed a polygraph exam. The judge barred the test as evidence. They were told, however, of Avila’s reaction when a detective came to the Lake Elsinore office of Professional Hospital Supply, where he was a van driver. He ran out of a side door, but was later apprehended.

During closing arguments, the defense attorney pleaded with the jurors to give Avila the benefit of the doubt. “Throughout the interrogation, he says, ‘I have no sexual intent,’ ” Pozza said. “He’s adamant about that.”

The defense attorney argued that Coker’s daughter was telling the tale because she heard a similar story from her friend, the one whose uncle went to jail for molestation. He hammered away at the lack of physical evidence, which prosecutors say resulted from the lapse of time since the alleged incidents and because the girls were not penetrated.

He attacked other inconsistencies in the girls’ testimony, like the time Avila invited Coker’s daughter to spend the night with him, even though the couple had broken up. The girl said she didn’t want to go, but ultimately agreed to visit for a few hours. Pozza also argued it was implausible that the molestation could have occurred without anybody suspecting it.

Finally, Pozza focused on the prosecution’s failure to call as witnesses several people who might have corroborated the accusation.

Jurors told prosecutors after their verdict that they went into the jury room confident they would convict but in the end decided there was a reasonable doubt.

Soccio said his office is proud of Dickerson’s efforts, despite the outcome and the aftermath.

“Paul was a pit bull,” he said. “He did everything he could ... We let him know he worked hard, he put on a good trial, and a jury made the decision to let Mr. Avila go, not Mr. Dickerson.

“But I think the responsibility here has to come back to something else,” Soccio said. “It wasn’t the jury’s fault. It wasn’t Mr. Dickerson’s fault. It’s Avila’s fault.”