Elementary school janitor wrongfully jailed for 5 years after ‘mentally ill woman’ lied he was raping kids: lawsuit

A California elementary school janitor was wrongfully locked up in prison for five years after a “mentally ill woman” and “self-confessed opioid addict” lied to cops that he was raping young kids, a new lawsuit claims.

Pedro Martinez, now 55, was working as the custodian at Maple Elementary School near Bakersfield when he was suddenly arrested and slapped with a slew of child sexual assault charges in 2019.

The janitor spent the next few years behind bars until he was eventually acquitted on all counts in December 2023 — but not before being “publicly humiliated,” “demonized” and wrongfully “labeled a child molester,” according to the suit filed in California’s District Court earlier this week.

The saga first erupted after a woman claimed to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in 2019 that Martinez had allegedly raped her girlfriend’s 6-year-old boy, the complaint states.

The woman alleged, too, that the janitor had “collected multiple children for group rapes that took place on a daily basis every Monday through Thursday over a several month period,” according to the filing.

Martinez claims that despite having no hard evidence, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department investigators and prosecutors started building a case against Martinez by relying solely on the woman’s “absurd and fantastical claims.”

According to the suit, Martinez’s accuser was mentally ill and “a self-confessed opioid addict with a criminal history who had repeatedly made multiple extremely similar allegations against others.”

The woman’s “allegations were so impossible and fantastical that any prudent person or law enforcement officer would have investigated her background to determine their veracity rather than take her word at face value,” the filing states.

Still, Martinez — who according to the suit had never even had a parking ticket — was arrested in January 2019 and hit with 11 counts of child sex abuse.

He was then “forced to suffer almost five years of incarceration” until the charges were tossed following a criminal trial in December last year, the suit states.

Despite the acquittal, Martinez argued in the suit that the “damage had been done.”

“Mr Martinez has been ostracized from his community and suffers, naturally, the deep emotional distress that would naturally arise from such a horrible, avoidable, offensive, and constitutionally abusive tragedy,” the complaint states.

The lawsuit — filed against the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, the district attorney’s office and other county officials — is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

The Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on the suit, citing the pending litigation.