Jury deadlocked at 11-1; new trial set for October
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The jurors asked for a little extra time to decide whether they wanted to conclude the child molestation trial on Saturday or Monday. But that was the last decision they agreed on.
A lone juror held out while the other 11 voted together in the case against 32-year-old Diego Morales Ruiz, who was charged with fondling a young family member, so the Jones County Circuit Court case was declared a mistrial.
The jury — made up of five white men, five white women and two black women — deliberated for almost three hours Saturday afternoon before notifying the court that they were deadlocked. It was not announced if the majority voted “guilty” or “not guilty.”
The message to the court “indicated that one holdout won’t change their mind,” Judge Dal Williamson said. He asked if further deliberations could lead to a unanimous verdict, and the jury forewoman said, “No, sir.”
After hearing that, Williamson said he had no choice but to declare a mistrial, and he set the retrial for Oct. 12. Ruiz will remain in the Jones County Adult Detention Center, where he has been since Oct. 7, 2020, on $75,000 bond. Even if he does come up with bail money, agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have put a hold on him, meaning he may be deported back to Mexico.
Testimony in the trial began on Thursday and closing arguments were Saturday morning. The judge let the jurors decide whether they wanted to finish the trial on Saturday or Monday, and they picked Saturday — after requesting five more minutes to decide.
The young accuser — a close relative of Ruiz’s who was 9 at the time of the first incident she claimed — took the stand and underwent tedious, sometimes testy cross-examination from defense attorney Nathan Elmore of Ridgeland, who specializes in the defense of Hispanic defendants, particularly those who are in the country illegally. Ruiz worked in Jones County for years as an electrician, but he is an illegal alien from Mexico, law enforcement officials confirmed.
The girl, now 12, lives in Pennsylvania with grandparents. Her personality went from bubbly while talking about her life now to bursting into tears when she recalled what happened to her on the night of Sept. 9, 2019. She remembered the date because that was Ruiz’s 30th birthday and her mother was at the hospital with her 2-month-old baby brother.
She described how he “held me down on my mom’s bed” and touched her private parts. “I began crying,” she said, choking back tears. “It was the worst pain I ever felt. I was practically begging him to stop. Then he just left me there, no apology or anything … no remorse.”
She went on to describe more incidents — while she was in the bed with her siblings, in the car alone with him, in an above-ground pool at their mobile home.
“He would do it every time my mom was not around,” she said.
She finally told her mother a little more than a year later, while they were on the way to a Wednesday night church service. The mother immediately called the Jones County Sheriff’s Department and packed up the kids’ belongings and got them out of the house, prosecutor Kristen Martin pointed out.
“Mentally and physically, I was not able to continue … and I was afraid he was going to do it to my siblings, and I didn’t want that to happen,” the young accuser said, adding that she wound up being treated at Pine Belt Mental Health after a suicide attempt.
Before the girl took the stand, the jurors saw a video of her forensic interview with a child specialist in Gulfport shortly after Ruiz’s arrest, and she made the same accusations. He was indicted for the incident on one specific date — Sept, 9, 2019. Martin noted how rare it is to have a specific date in a case like this.
Elmore focused on the claims that were made outside of the indictment, after the girl said that Ruiz fondled her “three or four times a week” for a little more than a year. At one point, he asked her how many total times that would be and gave her a sheet of paper and pen, then asked her to do the math.
The girl, whose right hand was trembling as she took the oath, was on the witness stand for almost three hours. Martin objected a few times as Elmore seemed to ask her the same questions over and over, and the judge sustained most of her objections. At one point, Elmore objected to the “incessant objections,” and Williamson shot back, “I’ll conduct the trial.”
As the young witness tried to do the math equation, the judge told Elmore, “She can do that without you standing over her.”
Ruiz took the stand Friday afternoon and denied the claims against him.
“I never did any of those things,” he said. Hearing those allegations “makes me feel like a monster.”
When Assistant District Attorney Martin cross-examined him, Ruiz said, “Someone else put those thoughts in her head.”
In closing, Elmore said that the accuser was “following a script … and I don’t believe a single word of it.”
Martin pointed out that the girl’s claims had been consistent from the beginning and noted some of the disturbing details she included make the claims of her being coached seem “ridiculous.”
“This man took her innocence,” Martin said, pointing at Ruiz. “See to it that he doesn’t do that to anyone else.”