The big issue roiling a small town: Does everyone deserve a second chance?

By the time residents of little Brentwood, Md., confronted their mayor at a town council meeting, they were angry, confused and demanding answers: Why had the vice mayor resigned? “It’s disgraceful,” one woman declared that evening in July. Another pleaded, “People really want to know if he’s safe.” They were talking about Eric Reyes, 36, who spent 16½ years behind bars before being released eight months ago. Heeding advice from Brentwood’s lawyer, she barely responded to the half-dozen people who rose to complain. Advertisement To Treminio-Lopez’s left, the council seat once held by the vice mayor was empty. He resigned in protest in June, calling it “grossly irresponsible” to put Reyes on the payroll. The police chief’s chair was vacant, too. Amid the turmoil over Reyes, the mayor ousted the head of Brentwood’s four-officer force, demoting him to lieutenant. An attorney for the former chief said the demotion was retaliation because his client raised concerns about the town employing Reyes, a registered sex offender who admitted to taking part in a horrific assault when he was a teenager. “This is putting people on edge,” Pamela Moyer, 54, said at the lectern. Gesturing in frustration, she said: “That’s why people are talking. What kind of interactions will he have with the public?” “A rapist!” said Amber Shrewsbury, 38, scowling at the mayor. Advertisement The town, predominantly Latino, occupies half a square mile in Prince George’s County, which borders Washington and has long been a welcoming place for returning citizens. In 2007, he pleaded guilty to participating, with two other teenagers, in the gang rape of a 27-year-old woman, who said she was forced off a Prince George’s street at knifepoint, dragged into a shed, menaced with a gun and sexually brutalized. Advertisement “I’m trying to better myself since I got home,” Reyes said in a recent phone interview. … I just want to go on with my life.” He said, “I got bills to pay,” including rent at the relative’s home where he’s staying, six miles from Brentwood. As he struggles to move forward, he said, what he did in 2005 will always weigh on him: “I think about it a lot. “It’s unheard of that this person is now enjoying something he should not be enjoying,” she said in Spanish. And who has thought about me?” Advertisement Sitting in a cafe recently with her husband, she described her terror in the throes of the attack and the emotional abyss of the aftermath — the depression that consumed her, the cargo of guilt and embarrassment she bore and the nameless panic that can suddenly paralyze her even two decades later. “A thousand years could pass and I would never forget what happened,” she said. “I have nightmares,” Beatriz said, because “it’s something that destroyed me as a person. As a mother.” At the council meeting, one worried resident, Matthew Mangiaracina, 31, quoted ominous passages from a 2018 appeals court ruling in Reyes’s case: “a very serious threat to the community” … “sentenced to life imprisonment with all but 25 years suspended.” When he was done reading, he turned on his heels and went back to his seat. Advertisement “A lot of us are very worried,” Brian Skretny, 50, told the mayor, imploring her to “please look out for us.” The 47-year-old Treminio-Lopez, a Democrat who has been elected five times since 2015, sat tight-lipped, hands folded. She had made her sentiments clear in a Facebook post days earlier, writing, “I understand that this decision may have caused some apprehension,” but “it is important to recognize that everyone deserves a second chance.” She hadn’t mentioned Reyes by name in the post. At the meeting, she said it would be illegal for her to openly discuss an employee’s personal history. “Her question was if I can deny a job to a person who has a criminal record.” Advertisement Judging from the mayor’s Facebook post, this query cut to the heart of the matter: the need for “forgiveness, understanding, and growth,” as Treminio-Lopez had written. In the post, she had noted her “commitment to supporting returning citizens” and “fostering a stronger, more compassionate community.” Prince George’s, she had written, is “a place where everyone can thrive regardless of their past mistakes.” That night, the mayor answered the woman succinctly, in English. “I made my decision to hire the person,” she said. “He already served his time.” ‘Where else can he go?’ Treminio-Lopez left her native El Salvador as a teenager and has been a U.S. citizen for 17 years. “My vision is to unify Brentwood,” she told a reporter in 2015, when she became the first Latina in Maryland to be elected mayor, garnering 156 votes to her opponent’s 78. Nine years later, amid the controversy over Reyes, she said in an interview that she thinks the criticism being aimed at her is partly rooted in anti-Latino animosity. Advertisement “Where else can he go if we don’t give him an opportunity?” Treminio-Lopez said. Reyes began working for the town on the morning after Memorial Day, according to Stefan Leggin, the former vice mayor. Around that time, Brentwood’s police chief, Imtiaz Z. Alli, dug into Reyes’s past and raised concerns about the mayor’s hiring decision, Alli’s attorney said. “Alli sent a text to all staff members [about Reyes] but didn’t include me,” said Treminio-Lopez, who noted that she instructed the town treasurer, who is also the head of human resources, to consult with Brentwood’s lawyer regarding this “leak of information.” Soon afterward, Treminio-Lopez demoted Alli to lieutenant and installed an interim chief. A formal “employee disciplinary notice” that Alli received, a copy of which was reviewed by The Post, accused him of such misconduct as “sharing results of background check with staff” and an “inability to NOT allow personal feelings and animosities to influence decision.” Alli declined to comment. “He’s taking the demotion under protest,” his lawyer, Timothy F. Maloney, said. “The demotion is clearly retaliatory and in response to his accurate report that an applicant for a public works position had a serious criminal history.” Spurred by Alli’s warning, Leggin said, he researched Reyes online and found references to his case. Leggin, a council member who had been appointed vice mayor by his colleagues, said he was aghast. He resigned from the council effective June 17, telling a private Facebook group that “recent decisions have shaken me to my core.” “Safeguarding our residents is a foundational responsibility of government,” he wrote. Without mentioning Reyes by name, she shared a parable involving the three filters of Socrates, writing, “Let’s use the TRUTH, GOODNESS, and USEFULNESS test before gossiping.! “You are the mayor of this town,” Shrewsbury told her at the July council meeting. The county’s top prosecutor started a reentry program for former inmates, run by a former inmate. The county government boasts an administrative “ecosystem that works for returning citizens,” giving them “opportunities to transform their lives” with jobs and housing, and “become fully engaged and productive members of the community,” a 30-page handbook says. Treminio-Lopez, without offering specifics, said she has been a victim of sexual abuse. But she doesn’t allow that experience to cloud her hiring decisions, she said. Although she blamed some of the civic quarreling on ethnic animus, she also said she “completely” understands why some people are afraid. However, she said, “There’s a reason why he’s out.” Referring to prison officials, she said, “They let him out.” ‘Why didn’t I run?’ In 2007, when Judge Sean D. Wallace in Prince George’s Circuit Court sentenced Reyes, he said Reyes had participated in “one of the most brutal and vicious sexual assaults” he had “ever seen or read of.” What happened on Oct. 20, 2005, is described in volumes of archived court records reviewed by The Post. The files aren’t easily accessible to the public, which explains some of the angst in Brentwood, where residents are mostly in the dark about the facts of Reyes’s case. Beatriz and her brother’s wife, who had been out looking for jobs, were walking home from a bus stop about 4 p.m. in the county’s Riverdale area. Beatriz’s sister-in-law ran to get help after being robbed of $3, the affidavit says, while Beatriz, a Salvadoran immigrant, was “told that she would be killed right there” if she resisted. “I sometimes feel guilty,” she said recently. I always have that feeling: Why didn’t I run?” Hernandez and Mosquera, joined by Reyes, led Beatriz at knifepoint to a side yard, according to her trial testimony. An appellate court’s summary of the attack says the first part lasted 20 minutes in the yard, where she was pushed to the ground and raped by all three. Two decades later, speaking by phone, Reyes said he is burdened by “guilt all the time.” “I feel bad about what I did,” he said. “I feel like, damn, I can’t believe I did this — I hurt somebody in this type of way.” He said he was intoxicated that afternoon on alcohol, marijuana and phencyclidine, or PCP, a potent hallucinogen known to induce violence. “I’m disgusted with my own self,” he said, adding: “It’s not like I don’t feel remorse. … But I can’t go back in time and change it.” Beatriz told police that Hernandez dragged her by her hair from the side yard to a shed, where the three continued to sexually assault her. When the attackers heard sirens and a helicopter, and feared that police were closing in, Hernandez told Reyes that the victim “could not be left alive,” a prosecutor wrote in a court filing. After his accomplices ran off, Reyes “pointed a gun at her,” the filing says. “He acted like an adult, telling me: ‘You have to kneel. I’m going to kill you,’” Beatriz recalled in The Post interview. “I had to implore him, telling him: ‘Don’t kill me. One day, you’re going to be a father.’ … I told him that: ‘Please don’t do it.’” While she was pleading with him, she said, Reyes suddenly “just crouched and ran.” Eighteen months would pass before Reyes was arrested, long after his friends had been taken into custody. He said he went around half in a daze much of the time, waiting for police to roll up at any moment and haul him away. Mosquera and Hernandez were convicted of first-degree rape and other charges in trials in 2006 and 2007, while Reyes was still loose. “I went through some horrible things because of this,” Beatriz said, sitting with her husband. After the rape, she said, she endured “two years of depression. I only went from my bedroom to the bathroom, from my bedroom to the bathroom,” corseted in fear and pondering “a lot of questions for God.” Some acquaintances who knew what had happened treated her differently, she said. I began feeling that I should hide, when I hadn’t done anything wrong.” “Nobody deserves to go through what I did.” ‘I knew I was going to get out’ Reyes was arrested in April 2007 and indicted on 17 charges. Because Reyes had been six months shy of his 18th birthday when the rape occurred, his attorney asked a judge to transfer the case to juvenile court. But given the brutality of the crime, the judge ruled that Reyes, like Hernandez and Mosquera, could be prosecuted as an adult. To avoid a trial and the risk of never leaving prison, Reyes pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree sexual offense in a deal with prosecutors, who then moved to dismiss the rest of the indictment. About six years into his prison term, Reyes said, some fellow inmates “wanted me in their gang. I was like: ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that. “I almost lost my life,” he said. Before his arrest, he hadn’t been in school since the ninth grade. “I knew I was going to get out,” he said. I was going to get out if I stayed alive.” His sentence won’t expire until April 16, 2032, exactly 25 years after he was first put in handcuffs. He will be kept “under supervision” by probation authorities, the division said. If he violates the rules of his early release, he could be returned to prison to serve some or all of what’s left of the 25 years. As for Hernandez and Mosquera, their second chances, if they get them, won’t come soon. Hernandez was turned down for parole in 2017 and again this summer, a corrections spokesman said. When Reyes filed a job application with the town in May, five months after leaving prison, he was working in a Popeyes restaurant, according to his resume. He listed his most recent previous employment as “heavy labor such as ditch digging” in 2006 and 2007, in the months between the rape and his arrest. Under Maryland’s “ban the box” law, employers, with some exceptions, aren’t allowed to inquire about an applicant’s arrest record until the first interview. Jenchesky Santiago, the public maintenance boss who interviewed Reyes, is a former Prince George’s police officer and a second-chancer himself, having been sentenced to prison in 2016 for illegally holding a gun to an innocent man’s head in an on-duty confrontation. Santiago and Gaston have since resigned for reasons unrelated to Reyes, they said. “Will this person have access to any of our personal records?” Moyer, one of the worried residents, demanded to know at the town council meeting. If there’s a young single woman or young children?” “Thank you,” was all the mayor said. After hearing the news, she said: “I broke down. … I called my brother,” who is married to the woman she was with on the day of the rape. As for Reyes’s job, Beatriz said: “I’m scared now that I’ll bump into him.” She said, “I won’t go to Brentwood anymore.” She volunteers every April at events marking national Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, she said. “I still live in that prison,” she said recently. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/08/16/brentwood-second-chances-hire/