Daniel Revay Rodriguez, now 27, has been at the Flagler County jail for over a year and a half, awaiting his trial that began Monday on charges of raping a minor starting when the alleged victim was 10 or 11. He refused a plea deal. He faces mandatory life in prison if convicted on the most serious of four grave charges.
Just after 8:30 this morning, the boy, Elliot (*), now a 16-year-old adolescent–lanky, apprehensive, his pallor sharpened by a dark shirt, his hair in a bun–walked into the courtroom and took the stand.
He spent the next 70 minutes responding to Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark’s questions. After that, the jury watched a 90-minute video interview of Elliot by a Child Protection Team expert at such forensic interviews, conducted within a day of Elliot revealing to his mother what had taken place over the previous few years. The revelation led to a Flagler County Sheriff’s investigation led by Annie Conrad (now Annie Lagana) and Rodriguez’s arrest.
The case is entirely circumstantial. It is Elliot’s word against Rodriguez’s. There is no other kind of evidence–no DNA, no video surveillance, no phone records. But there are confessions by Rodriguez in a pair of phone calls with Elliot and his mother that detectives recorded. And there is Elliot’s Child Protection Team interview, and this morning’s echoing testimony to the prosecutor.
There is also this, which the jury of five men and three women (including two alternates who will not go into deliberations) saw: a complete absence of animus, on Elliot’s part, toward Rodriguez. There was no falling out in the traditional sense. There was no anger, no violence, no threats, no fear. Elliot had always looked up to Rodriguez, admired him, loved him as a father figure perhaps, found him great fun and considered him his best friend. “I kind of liked having him in my life, because he was kind of fun,” Elliot said. He called him Danny.
But Elliot had gotten increasingly uncomfortable with Danny’s behavior. A trip to Tampa, where the last sexual encounter took place, proved to be the last such encounter.
Even after today’s testimony, it’s not clear whether Elliot realizes the gravity of Rodriguez’s situation, or that his testimony could put him in prison for life–which is what made it that much more convincing: Elliot at no point gave the sense that he was looking to hurt Rodriguez, but only to describe what took place, how he went along with it, and how he decided no longer to do so. Elliot never sounded naive. He sounded like an adolescent who was himself amazed, as he described it, when he started researching the word “grooming,” and discovering that Rodriguez had carried out a classic case of it.
When Elliot was about 14, his mother decided to move the family to Pennsylvania so she could be with a boyfriend. Rodriguez had moved to Daytona Beach but was insisting that Elliot visit him there. Elliot feared the assaults would resume. So he told his mother, who immediately informed authorities.
The Child Protection Team interview and today’s testimony are the core of the prosecution’s case against Rodriguez. Elliot’s presence on the stand gave defense attorney Nicole Jordan-Dixon a chance to do what defense attorneys typically do in these cases: attempt to undermine the credibility of the accuser. Jordan-Dixon did none of it. She asked to quick, clarifying questions about the timeline of the alleged assaults. She had also opted not to make an opening argument, thus keeping the defense’s strategy hidden for now. But her questions to Elliot suggested that, giving up on contesting that Elliot was assaulted, she could be angling for convictions on lesser charges.
Elliot is making that very difficult.
He described how Rodriguez had befriended him and his family–Elliot is the middle child of a single mother who also has two daughters and a granddaughter–how Rodriguez’s became a father figure and his “best friend,” how Rodriguez bought him all sorts of presents–an iPhone 12, an Xbox, nearly daily DoorDash food deliveries, occasional pot–how he’d given him access to his debit and credit card, how Rodriguez even paid the $2,200 rent once, how he started spending the night at the house regularly.
And how, one morning as a 10 or 11-year-old Elliot bounded on top of Rodriguez on the living room couch, Rodriguez rubbed Elliot over his private parts, got a physiological reaction. “I guess he thought I liked it or assumed I liked it,” Elliot testified. So that night, a school night, Rodriguez went much further. “It just happened, I guess.”
Elliot and his family were living in Palm Coast’s K-Section at the time. A routine developed. After progressing from touching Elliot over his clothes top under his clothes, Rodriguez, Elliot testified, would give him oral sex. It happened “almost every time he’d come over.” He came over a lot. He made sure Elliot kept it a secret. Elliot, over-protective of his mother–of whom he at one point referred to as if he were her father–didn’t want her to find out. He didn’t want to upset her. And anyway he didn’t want her to think he was gay.
Elliot remembered that the first time Rodriguez assaulted him with oral sex–Elliot did not use the word “assault”–had been just before the pandemic. The prosecutor insisted on that timeline for a reason. Elliot turned 12 in October 2020. The pandemic started in March 2020. If the first assault–charged as sexual battery, or rape–took place before the pandemic, then Elliot would have been 11. Then the gravest of the charges applies: a capital felony rape charge involving a child younger than 12. Rodriguez also faces charges of rape and molestation of a child between 12 and 16.
This went on for a very long time, until, as Elliot was growing up, he was beginning to realize that something was not right. The trip to Tampa had made him especially uncomfortable. Rodriguez was supposed to take him there, but with a couple of Rodriguez’s friends, who bailed out at the last minute. So Elliot and Rodriguez went alone. There was another assault when they got to the hotel room, then they showered together, then, as Elliot described it. Rodriguez prevented him from getting dressed, clinging to in in bed all night.
The revelation to Elliot’s mother would happen soon after that. Eliot told Rodriguez that he’d informed his mom. Elliot told the CPT interviewer how Rodriguez reacted: “I’m so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen, I made a mistake,” he said Rodriguez told him. “It was all to make you feel better or whatever.” Rodriguez also allegedly told him: “I’m so stupid, I wish it didn’t have to end this way.”
Elliot said Rodriguez never forced himself on him, or asked him to do anything to him. But that’s irrelevant and not absolving of any assaults he carried out on Elliot, as Elliot described them.
In a brief exchange with Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols, who is presiding over the trial, Rodriguez today said he was “leaning to” not testifying, but was still having those conversations with his attorney. And of course the defense’s case remains ahead.
