A 25-year-old Texas man facing accusations of raping a 16-year-old is no longer in jail due to a delay by prosecutors in obtaining an indictment against him.
According to KTRK-TV, Luis Sanchez posted the $1 bail set by a judge last week and no longer is on the roster of Harris County Jail inmates.
Sanchez was arrested in May on a charge of sexual assault of a child under the age of 17, related to an April 2022 incident, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
Under Texas law, prosecutors must obtain an indictment within 90 days of a suspect being arrested. If prosecutors fail to do that, the defendant can go free on either a personal recognizance bond or a bond set at a level the individual can afford, according to KTRK-TV.
The district attorney’s office obtained the indictment two days after the dealine, KTRK reported.
Because Sanchez was listed as indigent, he was given a $1 bond.
“It’s an egregious miscarriage of justice that will allow a child rapist to be released to an unsuspecting public,” the girl’s mother told KTRK. The mother was not identified by the station.
“We feel blindsided, because we took comfort in the fact that he was initially granted a $75,000 bond, because we could sleep at night knowing he could not make that bond,” she said.
The woman said she learned of the incident when, three months after it allegedly took place, she took her pregnant daughter to a hospital.
The woman said her daughter told her, “Luis drugged me and raped me.”
WTF?
A Texas man accused of drugging, raping and impregnating a 16-year-old girl has been released from jail on $1 bond — after prosecutors missed the deadline to indict him by two days.Luis Sanchez, 25, walked out of the Harris County jail Thursday — three months after his… https://t.co/4O1B5A1Rs9
— My✒️name (@nomd3plum3) September 22, 2023
According to the Daily Mail, the crime occurred in April 2022 when the girl and her siblings went to Sanchez’s home. When her siblings went home, the girl stayed, and Sanchez gave her vodka to drink, the Daily Mail reported.
The report said she did not know what took place until she awoke next to a naked Sanchez.
A DNA test showed the baby the girl was carrying was fathered by Sanchez, according to the Daily Mail.
A representative of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said the deadline was missed by two days, according to KTRK.
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“Mr. Sanchez remains charged with felony sexual assault of a child and, if he is released on bond, he will remain under house arrest with an ankle monitor and an exclusionary zone regarding the victim and other children,” the Harris County District’s Attorney Office said in a statement, according to KRIV-TV.
“The District Attorney’s Office is continuing to investigate this case as well as potential cases involving this victim and others in at least two counties,” the statement said.
The alleged victim’s mother said that was hardly reassuring.
“God forbid, if he were to get out of the ankle monitor, he would be gone in a flash,” she told KTRK.
Sanchez is scheduled to return to court in November.
