An Ocklawaha man was arrested Thursday afternoon and charged with lewd or lascivious molestation.
Yelson Enrique Guevara-Garcia, 22, was taken into custody in connection with a case that was first reported Aug. 1 when a woman told Marion County Sheriff’s deputies that her 14-year-old niece had been sexually molested. The next day, a case coordinator at Kimberly’s Center for Child Protection spoke with the niece, who immediately said, “A guy tried to rape me.” The girl said she had gone to a friend’s house and was in a bedroom when Guevara-Garcia asked her if she had a boyfriend and if she’d ever had sex. She said he then started touching her “over and under her clothing,” a sheriff’s office report states.
The girl said Guevara-Garcia used an app on his Samsung phone that translates Spanish to English so he could ask her if she wanted to have sex with him. She said he also sent her Facebook messages asking her to come to his house, the report says.
The girl said that in the past when she would go to her friend’s house, Guevara-Garcia would call her “pretty” and “smack her buttocks on the outside of her clothing,” the report says.
On Aug. 8, the girl’s friend told the case worker that she was home watching a baby while her mother and Guevara-Garcia were at work. She said the girl was in her bedroom with the baby when Guevara-Garcia arrived home from work. She also confirmed seeing Guevara-Garcia on the bed texting while lying beside her friend, the report says.
After the girl told her what had happened, the friend said she told her mother when she arrived home from work. She said her mother then confronted Guevara-Garcia and “told him he couldn’t be doing things like that and made him apologize,” the report says.
On Thursday, deputies responded to Antebellum Manufacturing at 1120 N Magnolia Ave., Guevara-Garcia’s place of employment. They asked a man driving a forklift if he was Guevara-Garcia but he said he wasn’t and drove away, the report says.
A short time later, a supervisor confirmed that Guevara-Garcia was the man on the forklift. Guevara-Garcia then told deputies via a phone translation program that he had been in the bedroom with the girl and had communicated with her through a Google translation app. He also confirmed that he asked her if she had a boyfriend but denied asking her anything inappropriate or touching her inappropriately, the report says.
Guevara-Garcia was taken into custody, transported to the Marion County Jail and charged with lewd or lascivious molestation. He was being held on $25,000 bond and is scheduled to appear before a Marion County judge on Sept. 25 at 9 a.m. to answer to the charge.