Stepfather accused of raping girl caught trying to re-enter U.S.

A man who fled to Mexico after his stepdaughter told her teacher he had been raping her since she was 7 is now in an El Paso jail awaiting trial, authorities said.

Francisco Javier Herrera, 32, was apprehended at the El Paso border Oct. 14 and was arrested on a warrant from Tarrant County alleging continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14 , according to Roger Maier, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Herrera, a resident of Delicias, Chihuahua, applied for entry to the U.S. in October 2015 and requested a travel document when he was taken into custody and turned over to the U.S. Marshals Service, Maier said.

He is in the El Paso County Detention Facility on an immigration hold, with bail set at $75,000 on the sexual abuse charge, a jail employee said.

On April 3, 2014, the girl, who was then 13, told her middle school teacher that Herrera had been sexually assaulting her for six years, according to an arrrest warrant affidavit prepared by Fort Worth police Detective J.E. Chalifoux.

A warrant for Herrera’s arrest was signed by a judge in Tarrant County in September 2014.

The girl met with a Alliance for Children forensic interviewer on April 3, 2014, and said Herrera repeatedly sexually assaulted her over the years, starting by “touching her privates with his hand” when she was in the first grade, according to the affidavit.

On another occasion, she said, he took her to the movies to see Tangled and before the movie “turned into a park where he pulled her pants down telling her not to say anything,” the affidavit states. She said he raped her then.

Herrera denied ever taking the girl to the movies alone, according to the affidavit.

She related other incidents that occurred when she was in the fifth grade and at other times, including the day before she reached out to her teacher.

The affidavit says that on April 2, 2014, Herrera walked into her room and touched her inappropriately.

On April 3, 2014, Chalifoux asked Herrera whether he had talked to the girl April 2 in her room. Herrera said he had, but he denied touching her, according to the affidavit.

On April 9, 2014, the girl was seen by a Cook Children’s Medical Center nurse for a sexual assault examination, where she “related similar details of the assaults to the nurse,” according to the affidavit.

Herrera fled soon after, said Fort Worth Cpl. Tracey Knight, a police spokesman.

He is scheduled to make to make his initial appearance in court Nov. 3. When the Tarrant County district attorney accepts the case, Herrera will be brought to Fort Worth, Knight said.

This story was originally published October 21, 2015 at 6:25 PM with the headline "Stepfather accused of raping girl caught trying to re-enter U.S.."