HOBBS — Police arrived at Houston Middle School on April 7 in response to a possible sex crime on campus. The details were unsettling: A video was circulating throughout the school district of two seventh graders engaged in a sexual act behind the portables flanking the athletic field.
The explicit images of underage students potentially warranted a criminal investigation, police determined. But the girl in the video, a 13-year-old whose middle name is Larissa, says she told police and school officials another crime had taken place as well — she had not consented to the sexual encounter, and was raped as at least one onlooker filmed on their phone.
School officials came to a different conclusion. The incident, they determined, was consensual — as evidenced by Larissa not showing clear outward signs of distress in the video of her alleged assault. They wrote her up for violating the student code of conduct and assigned her three days of on-campus suspension.
Police made a similar determination of their own. In a brief incident report filed after an officer’s initial visit to the school, the responding officer concluded no rape had occurred.
“Based on the age of the two engaging in sexual action,” the officer wrote, the incident “will be consensual.”
The determination was an apparent nod to New Mexico’s so-called Romeo and Juliet law, a carve-out in the state’s statutory rape statute that allows for two minors age 13 or older to engage in sexual activity without criminal penalties, as long as they are not more than four years apart in age. More than half of U.S. states have some version of these laws, which are meant to shield juveniles in consensual relationships from prosecution. But the law doesn’t apply if — as Larissa says she described to police and school officials — one of the minors was forced into the sexual act.
According to Larissa and her mother, police failed to investigate the alleged rape even after the 13-year-old told officers it was not consensual. Another professional involved in the case confirmed Larissa’s account to Searchlight. That person asked not to be named because they work in a sensitive position with children and are not authorized to speak to the media.
Hobbs police declined to comment for this story.
Students like Larissa are at a particular disadvantage in New Mexico — a state where sexual assault and rape are reported at levels far above the national average, but where police often have dismal records for investigating those crimes.
Unlike most states, New Mexico does not involve its Children, Youth and Families Department in investigations of abuse involving only children. The lack of child welfare investigators in a case like Larissa’s means fewer outside eyes are involved in determining the circumstances surrounding an allegation of sexual violence at school.
And even if a case makes it to court, prosecuting sex crimes involving minors presents particular difficulties in New Mexico.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
“There are some evidentiary challenges that our state has that other states may not, including some of the rules that the Supreme Court has in place that don’t necessarily make it easy for us,” said Troy Grey, an assistant district attorney specializing in juvenile crime at the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office. Grey was not involved in the case in Hobbs.
Particularly challenging, Grey said, is the fact that forensic interviews — the initial interviews conducted by specialists after a child reports being assaulted — are not admissible in court. That means children will have to relive their assault in a courtroom months or years later. Often, memories of the attack will fade or become less reliable by the time they relay them to a jury.
“That then becomes the basis for the defense to be able to attack the credibility of the child’s testimony,” Grey said.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
But often, the first failure in the long road between the initial complaint and eventual trial falls with the officers who first interview the person alleging an assault. Discounting a victim’s account — as Larissa says happened in her case — can derail an investigation before it even starts.
‘Start by believing’
Hobbs police have struggled with sex crimes.
The department has spent much of this year embroiled in an internal scandal involving allegations of sexual assault by Wade Lyons, who served as acting chief of police until June of this year. In early May, a grand jury in Travis County, Texas, issued a felony sexual assault indictment for Lyons, charging him with engaging in a coercive sexual relationship with a city employee in Austin while he was a commander in that city’s police department.
Larissa’s alleged assault was one of more than 295 instances of rape or sexual assault reported to the Hobbs Police Department since 2022, according to federal data. Those rates — the third-highest in the state — are likely the tip of the iceberg, as the vast majority of those crimes do not get reported to police. Police made arrests in only 12 of those cases, leaving 96% unresolved.
Such crimes can be “the most complex cases to investigate,” said Mark Wynn, a retired police lieutenant in Nashville whose consulting firm trains law enforcement on sexual abuse and domestic violence investigations.
But in nearly every case, among the most critical moments in an investigation is the first interaction between the victim and law enforcement. That’s true in cases like Larissa’s, in which a substantial power imbalance exists between the person reporting the crime and the officials hearing her account, experts interviewed for this story said.
“There’s shame, there’s self-blame, there’s peer pressure — there’s just a dozen things that go on in the mind of the victim,” Wynn said. “You don’t start by not believing. You start by believing. The very moment the young woman said it wasn’t consensual, it should have been considered a criminal complaint.”
Police departments across the country struggle with that first step, said Kim Lonsway, director of research at End Violence Against Women International, a group that advocates for better responses to sexual assault. Many, like the Hobbs Police Department, have no processes for trauma-informed, victim-centered sexual assault investigations spelled out in their official manuals.
Officers often focus on the immediate circumstances surrounding the incident — which, in Larissa’s case, included a skeptical school administration — and fail to investigate factors leading up to the event that could help establish whether a crime occurred.
“You have to play back the tape” to understand what happened prior to the incident itself, Lonsway said. Those inquiries could reveal whether there was an abusive history between the victim and alleged perpetrator, whether friends or witnesses could provide additional context, or other information that could be key to a successful investigation.
“Everyone understands that to investigate a bank heist, you don’t just investigate what happened in the vault,” she said. “Events took place before that that tell you information, and events took place after that. But the reality is, most law enforcement do not receive any concrete, helpful training on how to investigate these [sexual assault] cases.”
