A new trial is scheduled to start on July 24 for Monserrate Terron, the 59-year-old Palm Coast man facing two capital charges that he raped a 7-year-old child at his home in 2019.
A 12-member jury deadlocked at the end of a four-day trial on May 25, resulting in a mistrial. According to a juror who served on the case, and who commented on the mistrial article on this site, “10 of 12 wanted him guilty,” while another juror commented that “from all of us in the jury box it broke [our] hearts to not to be able to bring closure to the family in this case.”
Capital cases require 12 jurors under Florida law. Non-capital cases require six. The jury must be unanimous to render a verdict. A mistrial by law must be reset within 90 days, if it is to be tried again.
The new trial is expected to follow the same contours as the first one, with the defense fostering doubt that the alleged incident took place ion Palm Coast, as well as seeking to create a different sort of doubt in the jurors’ mind. The defense has openly conceded that girl is the victim of abuse. But the defense has also suggested–without evidence–that someone else, not Teron, was the abuser. “I’ll submit to you that something happened to” her, defense attorney Harley Brook toold the jury in his closing argument, “But I’ll also submit to you that my client is not guilty of the offenses for which he is charged.”
During the pre-trial phase, or during trial segments out of the jury’s hearing, the defense attempted to push the theory that the girl was “hypersexualized,” a theory that incensed the prosecution because it skated close to making the girl look like the aggressor, and Teron the victim–an impossibility, given the circumstances and the ages involved.
The defense went as far as seeking to push an outright fallacy debunked by medical science: that because the girl masturbated since she was a toddler, something was wrong with her. The defense in essence was seeking to prey on lingering, hypervictorian prejudices about childhood sexuality among jurors. Circuit Judge Terence Perkins allowed none of it. Still, Brook successfully pushed the envelope in his closing: “The state is right, there’s something that happened to [her] here,” but he paired doubt about the perpetrator with doubt about location, with clear results.
Jurors appeared to have questions not about the fact of the abuse, but whether it took place in Palm Coast. The girl, who is the defendant’s niece, described in three different settings that the jury saw–two on video, one on the stand–how Teron had abused her since she was a kindergartener.
She lives in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, where he visited semi-regularly. She visited her uncle in Palm Coast, and he visited in Massachusetts, and her family had a second house in Maine, where both families spent time. Teron himself testified that there were nine visits between 2014 and 2020, three of them in Florida (though on one of those occasions the girl’s family went on a cruise).
The investigation conducted by the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office and the charges filed by the State Attorney’s Office are specific to an alleged incident in Palm Coast on a specific night in mid-November 2019, when the girl and her older sister stayed at Monserrate’s home on Edwin Lane. Their parents were staying at Hammock Beach Resort.
Even if the jury knew of abuse outside of Flagler County–two adult women testified at trial of being abused by Teron when they were the girl’s age and when they lived in Puerto Rico in the late 1980s–it could not legally convict without finding beyond reasonable doubt that the Palm Coast incident took place.
The girl had described the Palm Coast incident as taking place in the bedroom where she was spending the night, and where Teron had gone to spend 35 to 40 minutes with her before lights out. He acknowledged that he was in the room with her, alone. The television in that room was on. But he said the door was open, and his wife was in the living room, watching television and tending to Tootsie, her diabetic dog, who needed to relieve himself often.
Teron’s wife, who is the sister of the alleged victim’s mother, testified that she had eyes on the room the whole time–or rather, on Teron, but not on the girl: “He was sitting ion the edge of the bed with the door open,” she said in a deposition, “so where I was sitting, I could see that he was in that room.” She did not have eyes on the girl, from where she was. The implication was that Teron never moved from the edge of the bed. Both the wife and Teron claim that once they went to bed, Teron did not get up again until morning.
So it came down to different versions of what happened that night, however specific the girl got on the occasions when she described the Florida allegation (down to describing the Murphy bed that popped out of the wall). There was no physical evidence.
Teron has always denied the allegations in court. But Augustin Rodriguez, the detective who investigated the case for the Shriffe’s Office (he was a corporal at the time, he’s now a sergeant) suggested in a deposition that teron had shown some remorse the day he was initially jailed on the charges.
“I traveled to the inmate facility to go try one last interview with him. And we spoke for a few minutes,” Rodriguez said in the deposition. “And I was very stern. This was the — one of the first time I was just very, like, affirmative, saying like, I know this happened and — and so on and so forth. And I had mentioned to him asking him if he — if he knew the pain and suffering that he had caused? And he — he acknowledged it. He said, ‘Yes.’ He nodded. And — and I questioned him again. I was like, ‘So you do understand the things that you’ve done and — and — and the pain that you caused”? And he — he — he nodded. And then I asked him about remorse. And then he said that he had a lawyer, and that I would need to communicate with his lawyer for any other questions. And
that was pretty much it.”
James says
Please get it right this time.
Jimbo99 says
Same trial, but somehow the prosecution convinces the jury that the location(s) are accurate ?
Rebaca says
I would very appreciate to show the same thing on the dashboard
JimBob says
You can’t just assume the “locus delicti” even in DeSantis’ Florida!
Cynthia Riordan says
If this happened to her many times, why would the family come visit their home? Why would she not say, “I don’t want to go to Florida to see my uncle”! Something doesn’t fit with me. If This happened to me as a child I would have said I don’t want to go and explain why to her parents.