WESTFIELD – A city teen was released on his personal recognizance after he was arraigned Thursday on a charge of indecent assault and battery on child younger than 14 years-of-age.
The charge stems from a March 21 assault on a 13-year-old girl while she was having a sleepover at a friend’s house.
According to a report by Detective Daniel Gustafson, the girl said that she had been to a movie with a friend and returned to the other girl’s house where the two girls watched television in the living room where they were going to sleep.
Also watching television was the other girl’s 19-year-old brother, Colin Pacheco, of 19 Carpenter Street.
The victim said that after her friend fell asleep she was talking with the older boy when he started to kiss her.
Although she told him “no”, the girl told Gustafson, the boy continued to kiss her. She said he put his hands under her shirt to touch her chest area and also touched her other private areas.
“I told him to stop but he didn’t. Every time I pulled away he would pull me closer,” the girl said in a statement to Gustafson
The girl said before she was able to disengage and go to sleep “Colin told me not to tell anyone because he could get into big trouble and go to jail.”
The next day the girl called her parents and asked to be picked up from her friend’s house and, after her parents complied, she told her mother what had happened.
Gustafson was able to identify the suspect who came to the station for an interview in which he steadfastedly denied touching the girl although Gustafson reports that he had not told him what the girl said he had done.
“He stated that he sat on the couch and never came close to the victim he made sure there was a space between them,” reported Gustafson.
Gustafson reports that Pacheco reluctantly agreed to provide a DNA sample. He said he pointed out that none of Pacheco’s DNA should be found “inside her shirt or on her body” whereupon Pacheco remembered that the girl “drank out of my cup” and later remembered that he had given her a “good night hug”.
Gustafson reports that after the boy left he called the detective to say that “if the victim had any marks from him it is because he pushed her hard away from him at the end of the night.”
Gustafson filed a criminal complaint and Pacheco was arraigned Thursday before Judge Philip A. Contant in Westfield District Court. He was released on his personal recognizance pending a Sept. 25 hearing.
