As a youth sports coach, Cameron Joseph Baca liked to befriend South Orange County moms and dads as a way to get close to their male children and then sexually abuse the youngsters.
Baca was brazenly good at his crimes.
Without parents suspecting, he managed to separately abuse at least three boys–ages 11, 12 and 15–from January 2006 to December 2008.
]
Baca's MO was always the same: Get the boys alone, make initial physical
contact with seemingly innocent hugs, show them pornographic movies and
then begin touching them sexually–even pushing for oral sex and
digital penetration.
Eventually, parents figured out something
was awry and contacted police, who found in Baca's home more than 500
videos of little boys being sodomized by adults, according to court
records.
The cops secretly recorded a call between one of the
boys and Baca, who unwittingly admitted to illegal
sexual contact.
After his 2010 trial, an Orange County jury sided with prosecutors and convicted him of 15 felony sex crimes. Superior Court Judge David A. Thompson sent him away to prison.
But
Baca appealed, claiming that one count was ridiculous–an attempted
lewd act by holding one of the boy's hands in a car. How could hand
holding give “immediate sexual gratification”? he asked. He also
complained that his punishment is cruel–“a shock to the conscience” and
“grossly disproportionate,” especially because he had no prior criminal
record.
On June 29, a California Court of Appeal based in
Santa Ana told Baca that his jury had been free to interpret the hand
holding as a sex act because the law states that gratification can come
from contact with “any part” of the kid's body.
The justices also rejected the cruel punishment cries.
“Baca's
offenses were not merely passive felonies such as failing to register
as a sex offender or uttering a 'no account' check,” wrote Justice Richard Aronson
in the opinion. “Rather, he committed 15 criminal offenses, including
multiple lewd acts on children under the age of 14, exhibiting harmful
material to minors and possession of child pornography. His offenses
spanned several years and involved multiple victims. As the minor
victims' sports coach and family friend, he took advantage of the trust
these boys placed in him.”
Aronson also called the molester a future danger to little boys.
Upshot: Baca, 31, will continue to serve his whopping 51-year prison sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.