Defense says young girl wrongly accused ex-Pasco councilman

A young Pasco girl made up a story nearly two years ago because she wasn’t ready to tell her parents the truth.

She told them instead that her friend’s dad hurt her arm when really he’d molested her, Deputy Prosecutor Maureen Astley told a Franklin County jury on Tuesday.

At the time, the grade-school girl told her parents that former Pasco City Councilman Chi Flores twisted her arm and that she was scared and didn’t want to go to his house.

“She was a smart little girl. She made it so that she didn’t have to go back there,” Astley told the jurors.

Flores, 39, is charged with two counts of first-degree child molestation.

Astley said the incidents happened some time between June 1 and Dec. 31, 2016, though the girl didn’t reveal the truth to her family until last March.

A delayed disclosure is not uncommon with children, she said.

But defense attorney Scott Johnson argued Tuesday that the girl’s first story was the true story.

Months later her tale morphed into a “wildly different story” of sexual molestation, and then “the snowball started rolling downhill,” he said. Investigators made an assumption “so that all their resources were geared not toward finding the truth, but toward proving child molestation,” he told jurors.

When the girl first told her parents that Flores twisted her arm, they asked if Flores had touched her in any other way. The girl said “No,” and the parents believed that was the end of it, Johnson said.

Then last March, she told family members that Flores had touched her inappropriately but her parents didn’t immediately report it to authorities.

The next day she also told a school counselor and school officials called police.

Flores’ attorney says it’s an issue of both a false accusation by the young child and a sloppy investigation by Pasco police that landed his client in court before a jury of three women and nine men.

Johnson said jurors will see there is no physical evidence, no actual witnesses and no corroborations to what the girl claims happened.

Flores was appointed to the Pasco City Council in late October 2016 but lost his seat in the August 2017 primary, a few months after he was charged. He continued on the council through December.

Astley told jurors that the case against Flores “is about broken trust, broken silence and broken friendships.”

She went into graphic detail about each alleged molestation, and said the girl initially withheld the truth to avoid getting in trouble with her parents.

Astley acknowledged in her opening statement that the delay left investigators with a difficult task of estimating when the sexual assaults happened.

She also admitted that a detective failed to write a report about interviewing the parents, and that investigators didn’t talk to Flores’ daughter — a possible witness — until months later.

But, she added, those interviews were done, the information has been available to the defense and all of them are expected to take the witness stand in the trial.

Johnson on Tuesday again asked the judge to dismiss the case, claiming the prosecutor did not tell him about expected testimony from a witness.

A school counselor said the young girl was “visibly nervous and anxious, a bit teary eyed, and was having trouble focusing in class” when they talked in March.

Judge Cameron Mitchell said while new information about the girl’s demeanor should have been provided to the defense after Astley learned about it Monday night, it was not a violation of evidence rules and does not warrant a dismissal.

Also Tuesday, the judge excused a juror who said she is 18 weeks pregnant and having complications, including leg cramps that prevent her from sitting for a long time. She explained that the jury selection process was intimidating and that’s why she didn’t mention it before.

Her dismissal leaves the court with no an alternate if someone else has to be excused.

Testimony continues Wednesday.

This story was originally published January 16, 2018 at 7:44 PM with the headline "Defense says young girl wrongly accused ex-Pasco councilman."