A Yolo Superior Court judge has found sufficient evidence for a former Esparto foster parent and youth soccer coach to stand trial on 90 count of child molestation.
Judge Timothy Fall ordered 31-year-old Cristan James Rooms back to court for arraignment on March 28 following the conclusion of the defendant’s preliminary hearing Friday. Rooms is being held at the Yolo County Jail in lieu of $12 million bail.
Rooms has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he molested five young boys over a nearly five-year period.
An 18-year-old man testified last July that Rooms began molesting him at the defendant’s Esparto home when he was about 13 years old. He said Rooms, a former computer technician at a Vacaville elementary school, had been assigned as a “special friend” to the alleged victim when he was in the sixth grade.
The teen estimated that Rooms either diapered him or showered with him — masturbating him each time — on more than 30 occasions between the ages of 13 and 14, but that he never asked why.
“I just went along with it — I just didn’t know if it was right or wrong,” he said.
Rooms was arrested Dec. 12, 2011, after a different teenage boy confided to a mutual friend that Rooms repeatedly had molested him, Yolo County sheriff’s officials said. By then, Rooms also had become a foster parent to a 6-year-old boy, who was removed from the home during the law-enforcement investigation.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene