Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson speaks at a lectern. (Clark County)
Prosecutors in Nevada on Thursday threw out sexual assault charges against a Las Vegas teenager who was accused of engaging in non-consensual sex with another teenager while others watched and recorded the incident on their cellular phones, the boy’s lawyer says.
In March, Aiden Cicchetti, 17, was arrested on three counts of sexual assault by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. In May, he appeared in court and was granted a personal recognizance bond.
On the second day of the preliminary hearing in the case, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office dropped all three counts against Cicchetti – before his attorney even began to present the defense’s case, according to Las Vegas-based CBS affiliate KLAS.
Law enforcement buoyed and believed the girl’s version of the story. From the beginning, Cicchetti’s attorney suggested the dual-pronged investigations by police and prosecutors had been less than thorough because of failures to approach relevant witnesses and for mischaracterizing the alleged victim’s state of mind on the night in question. Now, the boy’s story appears to have been vindicated.
According to the arrest report filed in the case, the alleged victim went out with friends on the night of Saturday, March 24. That night, she met someone whose name she remembered as Aiden on a “party bus,” the court document says. She and her friends took shots and drank from an unidentified bottle of liquor he allegedly had with him. At some point in the night, the two teenagers had sex, the two teenagers had sex – and someone else had filmed it.
Cicchetti messaged her on Snapchat the next day to ask her how she was feeling about the sex, the report says. The girl told police she thought he was kidding at first. That allegedly changed when a friend sent her a message with three videos of the sexual encounter and writing: “LMAO look what I found on my phone.” The girl then watched the videos, according to the police report, but claimed she did not really remember much of the party bus night.
“The videos showed her in the backseat of her car with Aiden, both without pants, and Aiden was performing sex acts while [redacted] watched, laughed, and recorded on their phones,” the LVMPD wrote.
“[The girl] drove to school Monday morning and watched the videos again in her car prior to her first class. She was distraught and cried most of her first period. She spoke with her female friend, [redacted] during the next period and showed her the videos and told her she did not remember any of that happening. [The girl’s friend] told her it needed to be reported and helped report to school staff.”
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Cicchetti adamantly denied that anything untoward had occurred in his discussions with police. He said the sex was consensual and that he had initially been reluctant to even engage in the sex “and her friends forced him,” according to the LVMPD.
Defense attorney Ross Goodman said several pieces of evidence contradicted the girl’s story.
“There were three witnesses in the car who contradicted her entire story reporting that [the girl] initiated sex for close to 45 minutes before dropping Aiden off at his house,” Goodman said in a statement obtained by KLAS. “She insisted on returning one hour later to hang out with him. The home security video shows [the girl] walking, texting, and showing no signs of impairment. Contrary to her claim of being blackout in Aiden’s house for four hours, she was only inside of the home for eight minutes. She decided to file a false police report to cover up after watching the embarrassing video of herself forgetting the home security and Snapchat messages where she admitted to having consensual sex would prove her allegation to be false.”
The motion to dismiss the case was made by Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Rob Stephens, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Pro Tem Curtis Brown accepted the state’s motion.
The paper quoted the defense attorney further commenting on evidence that seems to have led Las Vegas law enforcement to drop their case.
“[W]e had on our exhibit list videos, surveillance videos, text messages of the victim between a friend of Aiden, who’s my client, where she’s agreeing to have sex,” Goodman reportedly said. “It was going to expose her to this evidence that completely contradicted what her version of events were.”
Law&Crime reached out to the LVMPD and the Clark County DA’s office for comment on this story, but no responses were immediately forthcoming.
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