Sheriff: Child sex assault victim Snapchats evidence of accused abuser in the act
CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – When Samantha Faella’s daughter came rushing into her mother’s bedroom on Oct. 25, she had something on her phone her mother needed to see. Faella said her daughter showed her Snapchat messages with what Faella described as “horiffic” sexually explicit images.
The images were of an 11-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by a 56-year-old man identified in the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office incident report as a “Hispanic male (Hector Morales).”
The man, investigators said, was a family member. Investigators would also later learn – this was not the man’s real name.
Faella said the young girl wanted someone to help and photographed the assault to have proof that what she was about to allege really happened. “I immediately was just – removing her from the space and letting her mother know. That was my first thing, like letting her mother know and getting her out of the area, like, away from that environment,” Faella said in an interview with Queen City News Chief Investigative Reporter Jody Barr in November.
Faella jumped in the car and drove straight to the girl’s home. She loaded the girl up and questioned her about what happened as the pair drove back to Faella’s home. “Kind of felt relief like – it wasn’t going to continue to happen. Like, I removed her from it. I talked to her in the car about, you know, things that happened, to know what to do next because certain things I would have had to bring her to the hospital. But it wasn’t severe enough like that. But either way, it’s severe.”
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“The mom came here, and she started freaking out. And either way, I was going to call the cops, but it kind of worked out because I wanted it to also feel like it was her choice, and she made the choice of calling the cops,” Faella said.
The incident report shows, that when the victim’s mother showed up, she demanded Faella destroy the photographic evidence the girl sent. “Samantha stated that the mother told her that she didn’t want any problems and for her to delete the photos and all evidence she has and forget about this,” Deputy James Holden wrote in the report.
Deputies later charged the mother with child endangerment, a felony that carries up to 10 years in prison under South Carolina law if convicted. The mother was charged on Oct. 26, 2023, accused of placing her daughter “at unreasonable risk of harm or did cause to be done unlawfully or maliciously…by omission…allow a sexual offense to be committed against an 11-year-old female she has charge and custody of,” the arrest warrant stated.
The Chesterfield County grand jury handed up an indictment against the mother on Jan. 8, 2024. We’re not naming the mother to help protect the child’s identity.
Soon after Faella’s 911 call, the top members of the sheriff’s administration had huddled at the sheriff’s office where the victim, Faella, the child’s mother, and the suspect were gathered in separate rooms.
Sheriff Cambo Streater confirmed he, too, was involved and receiving updates as the investigation progressed from the evening of Oct. 26 and into the early morning hours of Oct. 26.
At 10:28 p.m. on Oct. 25, county jail cameras captured the arrival of a black sheriff’s SUV pulling into the sallyport. A deputy opened the back door and escorted a handcuffed man into the jail. The man was booked and placed in a jail cell, where he would await formal charges and a bond hearing.
That man was later positively identified as Belisario Morales Mazariegos, a Mexican national.
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Not long after the sun rose on Oct. 26, the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office went to Magistrate John Melton’s office, asking for an arrest warrant for one count of Criminal Sexual Conduct with a Minor in the third degree.
Melton signed the warrant, and deputies served Mazariegos that day. He faced a bond judge that evening where Judge John Davis set a $20,000 bond. Jailers took Mazariegos back to his cell where a call to a bail bondsman would have been the first step to Mazariegos being set free.
Nothing in the records we obtained from the sheriff’s office or the courthouse shows any effort by the sheriff’s office to check whether Mazariegos was in the country illegally, which could have impacted his bond amount.
South Carolina law orders judges to consider 14 separate elements when setting bond and determining conditions under which a person charged with a crime is set free until trial, “that will reasonably assure appearance, or if release would constitute an unreasonable danger to the community or an individual, a court may, on the basis of the following information, consider the nature and circumstances of an offense charged,” S.C. Code Sec. 17-15-30(A) states.
Those elements are: family ties, employment, financial resources, character and mental condition, length of residency in the community, record of convictions, and record of flight to avoid prosecution or failure to appear in other court proceedings.
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The following section of the law requires a judge to consider “whether a person is an alien unlawfully present in the United States and poses a substantial flight risk due to this status.”
Our investigation found that the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office didn’t begin the process of investigating Mazariegos’ immigration status until Oct. 30, four days after Judge Davis set bond.
And that didn’t happen until Ethan Foard, a part-time bail bondsman got involved in the case.
It’s likely no one outside the victims, the sheriff’s office and the court system in Chesterfield County would have ever known about what unfolded—and the rest of what we’re about to lay out in this report – in this case had Foard not gotten involved.
Foard wears a lot of hats in Chesterfield County. No, not only the ‘Ain’t Here for a Career’ hat he wears to county council meetings to make a political statement of his opinion on politicians who hold political office for decades-long terms.
Foard was elected to Chesterfield County Council in 2022. He’s also a farmer, owns businesses in Chesterfield and Pageland, and holds a bondsman license.
He got a call from a business owner in Pageland following Mazariegos’ arrest, telling him the Mazariegos’ child couldn’t reach him for a few days and wanted to know if Foard could check surrounding jails to see if he’d been arrested for something.
The family believed if he was in jail, it was likely for some low-level traffic offense, Foard told QCN. But they just wanted to find him.
“And that’s what led me to call the detention center, as I normally would, to find out if they had somebody matching the description with a similar name to what we had to go off of and that’s what started the inquiry into this issue,” Foard said.
Foard said when he called the Chesterfield County Detention Center, it was worse than he’d imagined.
“By calling the detention center, I gave a few brief descriptive things to the lady on the phone, and she seemed to know exactly who I was referring to right off the bat and you never, ever get any feedback from a detention center officer. But in this one, it was different,” Foard told Barr.
“She told me on the phone; she said this one: if you’re planning on getting them out, maybe you should look at some details. And that’s very, very odd. It’s not something that would normally transpire. Once I was told that, that’s what made me really start questioning what was going on.”
Foard obtained a copy of the incident report. In it, he learned about the girl’s efforts to gather evidence, her cry for help, and the $20,000 bond set by Judge Davis. “Once I saw what the charges were, I knew this bond wasn’t for me, but it did bother me to the point where I said I need to do something.”
Foard also found out about the judge’s order setting the $20,000 bond on Mazariegos and that no one from the sheriff’s office showed up to the bond hearing. A bond Foard said a bondsman could have charged as low as three percent, meaning Mazariegos could have been $600 away from being freed.
Foard then got on the phone with Captain Wayne Jordan.
“I said, ‘How is it possible for a little girl to get sexually assaulted by an illegal immigrant and this person [to] get a $20,000 bond?’ And the response was, ‘Well, the magistrates can pretty much do whatever they want to.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s true. They do have the power in that in that instance.’ I said, ‘But what law enforcement officer or who representing this little girl went to the bond hearing on her behalf and told the judge, this is what’s going on,” Foard recalled of his conversation with the captain.
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“Who told the judge this guy’s a flight risk? And through text message, Wayne Jordan told me that he was under the impression that this guy had actually married the illegal immigrant, the family member of the little girl and that made him a legal citizen,” Foard said. He pulled his cell phone out and opened the text exchange between him and the captain.
The first text happened on Oct. 29, 2023, at 1:52 p.m.
“So, the next thing I say is, ‘Did the officer tell Davis that he is an illegal immigrant who sexually assaulted an American child that was 11 years old?’ Wayne’s response was, ‘Don’t think he’s illegal since he married that grandmother and don’t know if they did or not.”
“I said, according to his former employer, he’s an illegal alien. He’s got a $20,000 bond. Whether he’s legally here or not, a $20,000 bond is garbage. Is there still a database through ICE to check for his status?”
Jordan never answered Foard’s last question.
Foard mentioned the case to Barr a few days later, explaining he believed what he uncovered with this case may be newsworthy. We agreed to investigate Foard’s suspicions.
On Nov. 3, we submitted a request to Captain Jordan for any incident reports, mugshots, and federal detainers for Mazariegos created in 2023. Jordan released the records the following week, which included a federal detainer for Mazariegos, dated Oct. 31, 2023.
When we interviewed Samantha Faella two weeks after the arrests, she had heard nothing from the sheriff’s office. The victim still has not been scheduled for a forensic interview, Faella confirmed.
Faella also said she never knew Mazariegos was in a bond hearing on Oct. 26, saying she found out about the hearing after the fact, which is also when she learned of the $20,000 bond. When we interviewed her on Nov. 6, Faella also didn’t know about the federal detainer.
“I didn’t even know that it was happening,” Faella told Barr, saying she would have attended on behalf of the victim, “Oh, yeah, definitely. Because someone – she’s 11. She needs a voice.”
Faella, surprised at what she considered was a low bond amount, assumed the sheriff’s office showed up to bond court. It wasn’t until our interview two weeks after the hearing that Faella learned no one from the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office showed up.
“If I told you that the sheriff’s office wasn’t even at the bond hearing, what would you think of that,” Barr asked, “Why? They’re the ones that did the arresting. They know everything that happened. They know where to put it,” Faella responded.
Faella agreed the judge might not have had all the information he needed when setting bond on Mazariegos.
When we interviewed Ethan Foard in November, he didn’t know Faella wasn’t told about the bond hearing and hadn’t received victims services from the sheriff’s office, “If you tell me that after all of this time has passed since this has taken place and no one representing this little girl has received, been reached out to, been dealt with, kept abreast of what’s going on with this individual, that’s appalling to me. And something’s going to have to be done, somebody needs to be held accountable for it.”
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‘WE SCREWED UP’
Our efforts to interview both Captain Wayne Jordan and Sheriff Cambo Streater about the points we’ve reported here started back on Dec. 18, detailing in the email precisely what we were investigating involving the Mazariegos case.
Jordan agreed to work to schedule time for us with the sheriff, but said Streater was not in town the week of Dec. 18, suggesting an interview after the holidays.
We agreed.
On Jan. 2, the sheriff agreed to interview with us at 4 p.m. on Jan. 3 at his office in Chesterfield. Jordan wasn’t present at the start of the interview, but returned to the sheriff’s office as we were sitting down with the sheriff. Streater decided to do the interview without his captain in the room.
Our first question: whether the sheriff had read the reports in the Mazariegos file.
“I have not read all the reports, but I know what happened as it was happening, as it was being reported to me. So, yes, I’m familiar with the case,” the sheriff told Barr.
“What did you think when you heard what this suspect is accused of doing,” Barr asked, “It was all pretty egregious. And plus, it was unusual in that we had a lot of evidence. Let’s just put it like that. A lot of evidence,” the sheriff said.
Streater confirmed he was referring to the photographic evidence investigators reported the victim captured during her sexual assault. Streater also described Mazariegos as “not very cooperative” during the interrogation.
“So the evidence that this victim was able to document, photograph or record, did that help make this case,” Barr asked, “Absolutely. That’s what I’m talking about. Normally don’t have recordings on a case like this, but, you know, you don’t have video stuff or recordings or anything. The victim was very, very, very smart,” Streater said.
The sheriff also confirmed no one from his office attended the Oct. 26 bond hearing.
“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think so.” JB: “And why not?” CS: “Well, we normally don’t go to the bond hearings unless there’s a reason to. Usually, the judge will tell us if they want an officer at the bond hearing,” Streater told QCN.
“If the victim wants to be at the bond hearing, then obviously we go and we go and represent the victim; a victim’s advocate,” according to the sheriff.
However, we found a victim’s notification form in Mazariegos’ criminal case file at the courthouse. The form shows the victim signed the form indicating she wanted to know about Mazariegos’ court appearances and to be able to provide a written statement to the court before a judge sets bond. Faella said the victim was never given that opportunity.
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The sheriff provided us a copy of a Victim Notification Form with this note: “Spoke with guardian of victim would like to speak with judge.” The form is dated Oct. 26, 2023, and 12:28 a.m. written on it. Faella confirmed she received a call from Chesterfield County Magistrate Judge John Davis sometime after the bond setting, but the judge gave her information about the victim’s mother’s bond hearing and nothing about Mazariegos.
We asked Judge Davis for an interview about this report, but David declined.
“As an officer of the court, it’s inappropriate for me to comment on any court cases. I respectfully decline your request for an interview,” Davis wrote in a Nov. 9, 2023, email to Barr. When we presented Davis with the Oct. 26 victim notification form and the note asking him to call Faella, Davis responded to us a second time.
“I did make successful contact to the guardian of the minor child regarding the bond hearing for Mazariegos and his co-defendant from the contact information provided in the case file. The guardian declined to personally attend the bond hearing; from my recollection, the guardian stated she and the minor child were not in the county being concerned for the child’s safety and emotional wellbeing,” the judge wrote on Jan. 8.
Faella said the judge did not call her about Mazariegos and only discussed the mother’s bond, asking if Faella thought “she was a threat to be let out,” Faella confirmed to QCN. We asked Davis if he had documentation showing the call was related to Mazariegos’ bond hearing, but Davis never responded to our question.
“The jail will contact the victim, notify them of the bond here. And we usually touch base with the judge if we think there is a case where we particularly won’t interject on a recommendation for a bond or no bond or whatever, we’ll normally do that. Now, if your question is, was that done in this case, Jody, I honestly can’t answer that question, I don’t know. I don’t know,” the sheriff said.
The sheriff said, even without the sheriff’s office present in the courtroom, the judge had everything he needed to consider an appropriate bond for Mazariegos. What the judge didn’t have was documentation helping Davis comply with state law requiring a judge to determine whether someone is in the country illegally.
We wanted to ask Davis what he did to confirm Mazariegos’ immigration status or whether he relied on the sheriff’s office to provide that information. Davis would not agree to an interview to answer that question and to explain his decision to set a $20,000 bond.
“I do know that we did contact ICE, and that was done right away. That was done at the time of the investigation. So, you know, actually before I guess before the warrant was served on him, ICE was contacted,” Streater told Barr. “So there was a hold on him. I mean, I don’t know if you know that, but there was a hold on the guy,” the sheriff assured in the Jan. 3 interview with QCN.
“And that’s where I think we take a little turn,” Barr told the sheriff.
We informed Streater in the interview about the Oct. 29 text messages between Ethan Foard and his captain. The texts that showed three days after the bond hearing, Captain Jordan didn’t believe there was an immigration question regarding Mazariegos since Jordan believed a marriage might have established citizenship.
“In days after this bond hearing and arrest, your captain was under the impression since this suspect had married an American woman and he was here legally. It wasn’t till after that conversation some days after this arrest, did your captain contact SLED and ICE to get someone here to place a hold on him on the 31st of October, which was days after this happened. Were you aware of that,” Barr asked Streater. “No, I was not aware of that, I was told it happened at the time of the case were made,” the sheriff replied.
The following day, Streater provided QCN with a document showing a “temporary hold” in place for a man named “Hector Morales,” which the sheriff said was the name Mazariegos gave the night he was arrested. Nowhere in the document does it refer to immigration.
The form allows law enforcement to jail someone up to 24 hours jail without formal charges when a judge isn’t immediately available to sign charging documents. Mazariegos was booked at 10:30 p.m., long after the county magistrate’s office closed for the day and long before it opened the following morning.
The form sets a deadline of 24 hours for officers to charge accused inmates, “Otherwise, the Arrestee is subject to being released from the Detention Center,” the form states.
When we met with Streater on Jan. 4 when he handed over the record, we read the form to the sheriff, informing him the hold had nothing to do with an immigration hold. Streater contended his captain contacted SLED the night of the arrest to run Mazariegos’ immigration status.
“Is a fair criticism that the sheriff’s office jeopardized a man, an illegal alien to this country, getting out of jail, running away and never being held accountable, never being brought to justice because steps were taken on the front end to make sure that ICE was contacted immediately, there was a detainer in place immediately to make sure that this person showed up and was present for their day in court and his victim also was protected,” Barr asked the sheriff, “So the question is how do I feel about that? I feel like we screwed up. We screwed up.”
“He could have easily been let out. If that’s the bond that the judge put on them, which is it’s pretty weak bond for this kind of a case. But, you know, I’m going to point a finger at the judge because if we didn’t have somebody there to give him the facts of the case, then it’s not on the judge, it’s on us,” Streater said.
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The sheriff promised to make changes following our interview.
However, Streater called Barr on Jan. 8, asking to “redo” the interview. Streater said he was wrong about his staff not doing what they should have regarding Mazariegos’ immigration investigation the night of his arrest. The sheriff said Captain Wayne Jordan had records showing he contacted SLED’s immigration unit the night of the arrest, which would have refuted what Jordan said in the text exchange with Foard.
We asked Streater to provide those records, which would have changed the course of this news investigation. We immediately contacted SLED spokeswoman Renee Wunderlich to ask whether Jordan – or any other member of the sheriff’s office – contacted the agency.
Wunderlich SLED never responded to our inquiry.
Hours later on Jan. 8, we asked the sheriff whether he found documentation. Streater responded in a text message, “Wayne did not know the guy was illegal (the criminal history that was run at the time of booking was clear and there is no database available to check immigration status) until the 29th.”
The sheriff’s text corroborated Foard’s text exchange with Captain Jordan from Oct. 29, where Foard informed the captain of his Google search result.
“He talked with S/A (Special Agent) Roger Brock with SLED’s Immigration Enforcement Unit on the 30th,” the sheriff wrote to Barr in a text message.
Brock appears to have acted immediately since a deportation officer confirmed Mazariegos’ Mexican citizenship, according to the federal detainer filed with the county the following day.
The sheriff said he didn’t believe anyone on his staff was “withholding information or being dishonest,” despite confirming his office did not contact immigration until nearly a week after Mazariegos’ arrest.
The sheriff also said he’s implementing multiple changes, including having his staff contact SLED any time a question regarding an arrestee’s immigration status arises, having someone from his office at any bond hearing where a victim requests to attend, and if a judge needs information about a case that isn’t included in a case file, someone from the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office will attend the bond setting.
On Jan. 8, the Chesterfield County grand jury handed up indictments against Mazariegos and the victim’s mother for the charges filed against them on Oct. 26, 2023.
We contacted the victim’s mother on Jan. 9 for an interview for this report. “I don’t give you authorization to run a newscast on any of us,” the woman said. She also denied every allegation the girl and law enforcement made against her and Mazariegos.
When asked if she told Faella to delete evidence as alleged in the charging documents, the woman denied that saying, “I don’t know where you’re getting your information.” When we informed her it was from the sheriff’s office records, the woman said she was calling the sheriff’s office to straighten that out.
The woman said she planned to take her case to a jury trial. When asked who her attorney is, the woman refused to say, “I’m not telling you,” she said.
“All the accusations are false and that’s all I have to say, goodbye,” the woman said before hanging up on Barr.
The victim’s mother also claimed no one from the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office had ever investigated sex abuse claims involving the little girl before. Our investigation into that angle continues.
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