WOODLAND — Edward was in a bit of a hurry on July 13, 2016.
He’d left work in Sacramento around 5 p.m., he told jurors in a Yolo County courtroom on Friday, then drove back to Davis, where his first stop was picking up his 4-year-old daughter from the in-home daycare she attended at 816 Braddock Court.
Next he headed to Birch Lane Elementary School, where his son was attending a summer program.
Edward was focused on getting to Birch Lane, picking up his son and getting both kids to Manor Pool in time for their evening swim lesson, he said.
“When I was getting close to Birch Lane, when I was on Pole Line getting ready to turn, my daughter said, ‘Daddy, do you want to hear something gross?’”
OK, he said he told her. “Sure.”
“She said, ‘Dad, Teo put his pee-pee in my mouth.’”
Teo, said Edward, is what his daughter called Eduardo Alejandro Letelier, who along with his wife, Ximena, operated the daycare center on Braddock Court they’d just left – a daycare center both of Edward’s kids had attended for a couple of years.
“Pee-pee” was her word for penis.
“By that time I had reached Birch Lane,” Edward, whose last name The Enterprise is withholding because his daughter is an alleged molest victim, recalled in court on Friday. “I was in the parking lot. I was in shock. I asked her, ‘What do you mean he put his pee-pee in your mouth? Why?’”
“He said he was looking for cavities,” said Edward, quoting his daughter. He didn’t ask her anything else at that point, he told the court.
“I was just in shock and wanted to talk to my wife. I texted my wife and told her to call me right away.”
Later that night, Edward and his wife would contact the Davis Police Department and their daughter would undergo a forensic exam.
The next day, police would have Edward’s wife call Letelier to confront him about their daughter’s allegation over the phone — an allegation Letelier denied, said Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Melinda Aiello, who is now prosecuting Letelier.
When police arrived at the Braddock Court house later on July 14 to serve a search warrant, Aiello said, Letelier attempted to flee, then resisted arrest.
He’s now on trial in Yolo Superior Court facing both child molestation and resisting arrest charges.
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Eduardo Letelier. Enterprise file photo
The trial got underway Thursday afternoon with opening statements and continued Friday with testimony from Edward.
In his opening statement on Thursday, Letelier’s defense attorney, Michael Chastaine, told jurors the allegations against his client are completely false.
Letelier, Chastaine said, “is an innocent man sitting in the worst possible chair that you could be in, in this courtroom, this county, this state.”
Jurors, he said, would hear from a number of witnesses who would still trust Letelier to care for their children “even knowing this allegation.”
And they would also hear how the girl’s mother, a graduate student in human development at UC Davis, “is obsessed with child abuse,” Chastaine said.
“I may never be able to prove to you exactly why a 4-year-old girl says anything, but what we do know and you will see evidence of, is that (her mother) is obsessed with child abuse,” said Chastaine.
“She studies it, she’s in school for it… She posted (on Facebook) that you should talk to your child about child abuse starting at 18 months. She posted that she actually, instead of reading bedtime stories, she reads articles about her studies about child abuse.”
Chastaine also told jurors they would see evidence that his client never resisted arrest.
“You will see that when the police came up to him, he had his hands up,” Chastaine said. “You’ll see the actual video… that they came and rushed him right to the ground and they punched him in the face and they didn’t need to do that.”
Letelier, said Chastaine, “is a big man. And on top of that he has rheumatoid arthritis … the man can’t run two steps.”
In her opening statement on Thursday, Aiello said the girl told her parents and later a forensic interviewer that Letelier put his penis in her mouth when they were brushing their teeth together.
During a search of the house, Aiello said, police collected all the toothbrushes and sent them to the Department of Justice for DNA examinations.
One toothbrush, said Aiello, contained a mix of DNA — that of Letelier’s daughter and that of someone else.
Everyone else was excluded as that other donor except Edward’s daughter.
“(The girl) could not be excluded as a possible donor of that DNA,” Aiello said.
And the children at the day care, she added, were not supposed to use those toothbrushes.
When the trial resumes on Monday, jurors will see a video of the forensic interview conducted with the girl at Yolo County’s multi-disciplinary interview center. The jury of eight men and four women are also expected to hear from the girl herself, as well as her mother and a number of experts over the course of the trial.
Letelier, meanwhile, is free on $1 million bail and Ximena’s Daycare, the facility he has operated with his wife since 2001, has been closed since the state Department of Social Services’ Community Care Licensing Division temporarily suspended the Leteliers’ license to operate the daycare while the case is pending.
— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at aternus@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy.