SAN JOSE — Disgraced former city councilmember Omar Torres was sentenced to 18 years in prison Friday after his April conviction for sexually abusing a younger relative in the 1990s, a shocking revelation that surfaced after a separate scandal involving Torres’ reputed sexual interest in minors.
Former San Jose City Councilmember Omar Torres is arraigned on three felony counts of child molestation, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, at the Hall of Justice in San Jose, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Torres, 43, appeared in Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Sevely’s courtroom, where she announced his legal fate.
Torres will also be required to register as a sex offender in the state as a result of his conviction.
In April, Torres pleaded no contest to three felony counts: sodomy, oral copulation, and lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14, stemming from a Nov. 25, 1999 encounter with his younger relative. Authorities stated in court documents that Torres was 18 and the victim was 13 at the time of the crime, and the victim told authorities that the abuse started when he was 4 years old, escalating in severity until that 1999 instance after Torres became a legal adult.
In a court filing prior to Torres’ sentencing, his attorney Nelson McElmurry requested that Sevely sentence his client to five years in prison. McElmurry cited a rehabilitative journey since the crime occurred that included extensive public service culminating in Torres’ election to the San Jose City Council, a position he gave up last November after he was criminally charged.
Deputy District Attorney Jason Malinsky objected to that characterization in his own court filing, arguing that Torres had shown middling remorse and benefited for a quarter-century from keeping the crime secret, leading to the victim suffering an array of post-traumatic stress effects in the intervening years. Malinsky requested a total of 18 years of incarceration for Torres, or three consecutive six-year sentences for the crimes to which he pleaded.
The road to Torres’ conviction first became public last October, when he was detained and questioned by San Jose detectives who were initially conducting a separate investigation at his request. Torres claimed that a Chicago man was extorting him under a threat to reveal a sexual tryst to his partner and colleagues.
But the investigation uncovered sexually explicit text exchanges from 2022 between Torres and the man in which they shared sexual fantasies that included Torres describing the genitalia of an autistic 11-year-old boy with whom he has a family-type relationship. One of the messages, in the midst of discussing a multi-partner sexual encounter, involved Torres asking the man if “U got any homies under 18.” After his police interrogation became publicly known but before the sexual abuse allegation was made, Torres claimed that the messages were part of a fantasy role-play that the Chicago man then exploited.
Authorities said the resulting media coverage of the scandal prompted his relative to report his abuse to police on Nov. 4. That was soon followed by a police-monitored phone call between the victim and Torres, who reportedly admitted to sexually abusing the victim and said his behavior was in part a consequence of his own sexual abuse as a child. Torres was arrested the next day.
In dueling sentencing memos filed by McElmurry and Malinsky, the two attorneys sparred over the extent to which Torres had reformed himself and exactly how much culpability he was accepting when he entered his no-contest plea earlier this year.
McElmurry argued for a lenient sentence, citing Torres’ “youth at the time of the offenses, his own severe victimization as a child, his self-awareness and voluntary cessation of the conduct upon turning 18, and his extraordinary record of rehabilitation and service over the last 25 years.”
He also referenced a defense-commissioned report by forensic psychologist Brian Abbott, who wrote that the sexual abuse by Torres “was not the product of inherent predation and pedophilia but rather maladaptive coping with PTSD and immature reasoning of a youth already deeply compromised by years of unresolved trauma.”
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Malinsky called the report “self-serving” and unsupported by evidence. He outlined the serial abuse — most of which was not criminally charged because Torres was also a minor at the time — that began in El Paso, Texas and then continued in San Jose. That included citing a statement the victim gave to the county Probation Department saying “it was happening so often that I knew as soon as I was alone (Omar) would appear … many times it was him escorting me into his room and within a matter of just a few minutes he would force me” into sex acts.
The prosecutor challenged a defense claim that Torres ended the abuse in an act of self-realization. Malinsky cited the victim’s claim that after a family conversation involving the abuse of a separate relative by an uncle, Torres realized that he would be found out if he continued his behavior. The victim said the 1999 encounter that fueled Torres’ conviction was a direct result of that realization, and that Torres told him “this is going to be the last time I do this with everything that’s going on I do not want to get caught.”
Malinsky added that a Probation Department presentencing report described a “troubling lack of remorse” by Torres and “showed a disturbing focus on how he would be represented in the headlines rather than taking responsibility for his actions,” and wrote that the text-message scandal countered the rehabilitation narrative by showing an “ongoing sexual interest in minors.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
