The former Gilroy High School math teacher who pleaded no contest to four counts of sex crimes with a girl half his age will serve one year in county jail.
In return for his plea, Alberto Gomez Vicuna Jr., 32, will not receive the maximum penalty for his crimes of 10 years in state prison. Instead, he will serve a one-year stint in county jail followed by three years of probation and lifetime registration as a sex offender, said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Ray Mendoza.
Vicuna was originally charged with a total of nine counts of sex crimes – one count of lewd or lascivious act on a child, two counts of oral copulation with a minor, three counts of sexual penetration of a person under the age of 16 and three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 16 – stemming from a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old San Jose girl during the early morning hours of Feb. 19. However, the District Attorney’s Office dismissed five counts in exchange for Vicuna’s plea of no contest.
“Initially we charged him with every conceivable count in case we found any other victims,” Mendoza said. “He had been on a Web site advertising himself as underage and looking for girls ages 14 to 17. We didn’t know if this would be one of these cases where we’d have a lot of victims.”
However, no other victims came forward, Mendoza said.
Vicuna will be formally sentenced 9 a.m. June 2 in Department 24 at the Hall of Justice in San Jose.
The victim, who is not a Gilroy High School student, met Vicuna online three weeks before the incident when he “friended” her on an Internet social networking site, Tagged.com, according to police reports. Vicuna was posing on the site as a 15-year-old named Juan G. Police said his profile claimed 120 friends, all but one or two of whom were female between the ages of 13 and 17. The victim’s Tagged.com account listed her as 14 years old.
The victim told police she had spoken to Vicuna several times over the phone before he asked to meet her in person about 2 a.m. Feb. 19. Vicuna told the girl he was actually 28 and that he “forgot” to change his profile.
“I thought we were just going to talk at first,” she said, according to the police report.
About 2:40 a.m., the girl snuck out of her house and met Vicuna down the street from her home, according to the police report. The two talked for about 10 minutes before Vicuna began touching the victim’s breasts and genitals. After refusing Vicuna’s sexual advances twice and trying to push him off her, the girl finally “gave up on him,” at which point they performed unprotected sexual acts and had unprotected intercourse, she told police.
When the victim’s mother called her cell phone at about 3:40 a.m., Vicuna turned off the phone, removed the battery and drove to his home in Morgan Hill, according to the police report.
The girl told police that, at that point, she was still “shocked and scared,” but was not afraid of Vicuna.
Once at the Morgan Hill home – which Vicuna told the girl he shared with several roommates – Vicuna and the girl had unprotected sex two more times, according to the police report. The first time, the victim again “yelled at him to stop” but “he did not respond and kept going,” according to the report. The second time, she “just let him do whatever he wanted,” according to the report.
At about 6:30 a.m., Vicuna instructed the victim to take a shower, where he joined her and continued the sexual activity until she told him she was uncomfortable and stopped, according to the police report.
At 8 a.m., the girl and Vicuna stopped for coffee at a Starbucks in Morgan Hill and went to a drug store to purchase the morning after pill, according to the police report. He then dropped her off about 10 a.m. at Oak Grove High School in south San Jose – which was not in session that week – where she waited for her parents. After initially telling them a story Vicuna had concocted about her having to sneak away to help a pregnant friend with an abusive boyfriend, the girl told her parents the truth.
During their investigation, police used the victim’s user name and password to access her Tagged.com account, police said. In an online conversation between police and the suspect, Vicuna – believing he was chatting with the victim – assured the girl that she wasn’t pregnant and advised her to erase all evidence of their correspondence. He also wrote that he wanted to see the victim again and “maybe do a lil more,” a comment he followed up by typing a winking emoticon.
Police arrested Vicuna Feb. 25 after matching the surveillance photo from the Starbucks with Vicuna’s driver’s license photo and confirming with the Gilroy Unified School District that Vicuna was a district teacher, police said.
Mendoza said he did not pursue rape charges because of the difficulty he would have convincing a panel of 12 jurors to agree on the issue of force, given that the girl had agreed to sneak out to meet Vicuna and consented to some sexual activity.
Although Gilroy High School’s Web site still lists Vicuna as an Algebra 1 instructor teaching out of room P-5, he is no longer a teacher with the district, said Superintendent Deborah Flores.
“He won’t be returning and he’s been notified of that,” she said.
Vicuna, who was a first-year teacher at GHS and earned $65,000 annually in salary and benefits, according to district documents, was initially placed on paid administrative leave until about a month ago, when the district permanently released him from his contract, Flores said.
