A Catholic priest on trial for alleged child sexual abuse involving two female parishioners listened in D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday as a third young church member described getting an unwanted kiss on the mouth from him when she was 16.
Vazquez, who was ordained a priest in the Capuchin Franciscan religious order in 2014, is not on trial in connection with the alleged kiss. He is charged with four felony counts of second-degree child sexual abuse and one misdemeanor count of child sexual abuse. He is accused of groping a 13-year-old girl and kissing and groping a 9-year-old girl at the church in 2016.
The Washington Post generally does not identify victims of alleged sexual offenses without their consent.
The woman who testified Monday told the jury that she, her mother and Vazquez were about to eat lunch in a church dining room one Sunday in May 2015 when her mother left the room to get plates and utensils.
“We were having a conversation,” the woman said of herself and Vazquez, “and in the middle of the conversation . . . he put his hands on my shoulders and opened his mouth and kissed me.” She said her mother returned to the room in time to see what was happening, and Vazquez pulled away, saying, “I’m sorry. I don’t what came over me. I don’t know what came over me.”
Later that day, she testified, Vazquez apologized to her and her mother. She said they did not report the alleged incident to police until last year, after Vazquez’s alleged sexual abuse of the other girls came to light.
She said she was “too scared” to file a police complaint. “I didn’t want anybody to talk badly about me or my family at the church,” she said. After the apology, she said, Vazquez “didn’t chat with my family as much as he did before. . . . He became very distant.”
Earlier Tuesday, in his opening statement to the jury, Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Matt Williams urged the panel to focus on the concept of “trust.”
“Coaches, teachers, clergy members, to whom trust is given as a gift,” he said. Gesturing to Vazquez, he said, “This man . . . violated that sacred trust.”
Defense attorney Robert Bonsib, in his opening statement, suggested the alleged victims fabricated their stories. He told jurors that the alleged incidents occurred in open areas of the church and rectory at times when people were around who could easily have seen what was happening.
“Some of this stuff, frankly, doesn’t make sense,” he said, adding that the allegations do not “even meet the common-sense test.”
The alleged victim who was 13 in 2016 was with other youngsters selling snow cones outside the church, which sits close to 16th Street NW and Park Road. Afterward, Williams said, the girl was resting in a church office, sitting in a swivel chair, when Vazquez walked in.
After striking up a conversation with the girl, he “crept closer and closer and closer,” the prosecutor said. He said Vazquez slid a hand under her shirt and groped one of her breasts. “She froze,” then swiveled away from him, but he groped her again, Williams told the jury. Later, she hurried to a bathroom and cried, the prosecutor said.
As for the girl who was 9 in 2016, Vazquez allegedly kissed her on the mouth and sexually groped her for the first time in June of that year. “It happened a number of times,” Williams told the jury. “So many times, she’s going to have trouble estimating how many times” when she takes the witness stand, he said.