Escondido babysitter and boyfriend plead not guilty to molesting children and filming the acts
Reporting from Vista, Calif. — An Escondido babysitter and her boyfriend on Friday pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of conspiracy and child molestation, a case that authorities said left them disturbed and outraged.
Authorities allege that Brittney Mae Lyon, 22, repeatedly took two young girls to the Carlsbad home of her boyfriend, Samuel Cabrera Jr., also 22, and then filmed as he molested them.
The pair is charged with multiple counts, including conspiracy to molest, conspiracy to kidnap for the purposes of molestation, three counts of child molestation and forcible lewd acts on a child. They face life in prison if convicted.
Cabrera was being held on $2.6-million bail. Vista Superior Court Judge James Mangione on Friday raised Lyon’s bail to the same amount, saying he found both defendants “to be a substantial risk to public safety.”
Prosecutor Jodi Breton said that not only had Lyon provided the victims to Cabrera, in some instances she had helped undress them.
“She tricked the parents and the children into thinking they were going to be doing something fun” and then betrayed them, Breton said.
The two victims, both 7, didn’t know each other, authorities said. One is from Escondido and the other from Oceanside.
One of the girls is “very developmentally delayed” and was unable to communicate what happened to her, Breton said. She also said that Lyon was a family friend of one of the girls.
“The families are devastated, as you can imagine,” Carlsbad police Lt. Marc Reno said Thursday.
He said he believes that Lyon met one of the children through her babysitting service, and said investigators were looking into the possibility that the molestations could reach back two years.
Breton said Lyon and Cabrera had been friends since high school and that he initially had persuaded her to take cameras into gyms and store dressing rooms and secretly videotape women while they were changing.
That progressed into Cabrera asking Lyon to bring children to his home so he could molest them, Breton said.
The allegations came to light this week when the child from Oceanside disclosed the alleged abuse to her mother, who then contacted police.
A search of a home on Greenhaven Drive in Carlsbad, where Cabrera lives with family, turned up “a ton of recorded material” — including computers, hard drives, video sticks and GoPro cameras — Reno said.
“So much of it, it will take a while to sift through it,” he said.
Figueroa writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
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UPDATES:
6:35 p.m.: This article was updated with details about the plea and other aspects of the case.
This article was first posted at noon.
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