A judge ruled Wednesday that prosecutors had enough evidence to charge a man with kidnapping and sodomizing a 13-year-old boy who was walking home in Atascadero.
Barry Alan Wilson, 24, was held to answer to felony child molestation using force, sodomizing a child under age 14 and kidnapping to commit a sex crime.
The case is unique because it is one of a few in San Luis Obispo County solved through DNA collected from a defendant during a separate crime, then matched through a database, said prosecutors. Under Proposition 69, approved in 2004, anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony can be required to give a DNA sample.
Wilson sat in court Wednesday, shackled and hanging his head as Atascadero Police Department Detective Rochelle Hanson testified she was on duty around midnight Aug. 21, 2005, when she saw a young boy on the street after curfew.
“He said he had been sodomized … He was hysterical,” said Hanson, not identifying the boy because he is a minor and the purported victim of a sex crime.
“He told us that he had been at his grandmother’s house and was walking home late (that) night,” and he had gone to his cousin’s house and drank several beers, Hanson said.
While walking home on El Camino Real around 10:45 p.m., the boy said he saw Wilson across the street and thought he recognized him.
But after Wilson crossed the street, the youth realized that he didn’t know the man. Wilson allegedly made a sexual comment to the boy.
“(The boy) was picked up and thrown in the bushes,” Hanson said. “(Wilson) picked him up by the shoulders.”
The boy — who was about five feet tall and weighed 101 pounds — said Wilson pulled down his pants and orally copulated him. Wilson moved him farther into the bushes and sodomized him, the teen said.
Wilson then left, and the boy walked to Vons to use the restroom, Hanson said.
The crime went unsolved until this year, when the state Department of Justice sent police a letter explaining technicians had matched DNA from Wilson to semen taken from the boy after the assault, Hanson said.
Hanson then interviewed Wilson at a Bakersfield rehabilitation center where he was living while on probation for unrelated crimes. He claimed the encounter with the boy was mutual, but said he went too far and thought the boy was 15 years old, Hanson said.
Wilson’s public defender Fred Foss said he plans to fight the case and objected in court to the kidnapping charge, calling it overkill, and later saying it carries a life sentence.
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