Snohomish County Jury Awards $3 Million Over State's Failure to Report Child Sex Abuse

In 2001, a Monroe police sergeant named Carlos Martinez taught the drug education program known as DARE in a Snohomish County school district, where he met a 13 year old student. He also worked as a school resource officer. Martinez later hired the girl to babysit his children, and according to the lawsuit she filed in 2019 against the State of Washington, he sexually abused her for several years afterward.

The lawsuit did not seek damages from Martinez. It argued that a state Child Protective Services investigator, who was legally obligated to report suspected child abuse, suspected what Martinez was doing to the girl and never filed the mandatory report. The investigator was close to the Martinez household and knew the girl, and at one point she took her suspicions to the girl's school counselor instead of reporting them to the state. The complaint alleged she stayed quiet because of her own romantic relationship with Martinez. The woman also said school staff brushed her off when she tried to raise what was happening, recalling a guidance counselor who told her that if she cried wolf too many times, no one would believe her.

The state denied responsibility and asked Judge Cindy Larsen to throw out the negligence claims in February 2023, arguing its employee's dealings with the girl fell outside the scope of her employment. Larsen refused, and the case went to trial, where the state told jurors the employee's contact with the child had been limited and infrequent and had happened off the clock. The 10 person jury sided with the woman. On November 2, 2023, it found the state child welfare agency, then part of the Department of Social and Health Services and now the Department of Children, Youth and Families, negligent for failing to report what its employee suspected, and awarded $3 million. The same jury found the Monroe School District was not negligent. Judgment on the verdict was entered later that month.

Raymond Dearie of Dearie Law Group represented the woman at trial. "The system did not work properly for my client many years ago," he told The Daily Herald after the verdict. "No one heard her, and the jury heard her this time." He called the abuse preventable and said the case was about protecting children from a system that failed to look.

Martinez was prosecuted separately, and he was never criminally convicted of abusing the woman. Charges including child rape and child molestation were dropped, and a jury's voyeurism conviction was vacated before sentencing. In 2015 a Snohomish County judge sentenced him to 14 months in prison, the maximum the law then allowed, for possessing images of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The woman had reported him to law enforcement in Texas in 2011.

The state appealed the $3 million judgment to Division One of the Washington Court of Appeals. Separately, in late February 2024, the woman's attorneys asked the Snohomish County trial court to vacate the judgment and grant a new trial, arguing the state had failed to produce a 2013 Washington State Patrol recording of an interview with the caseworker who had suspected Martinez, and that her lawyers obtained the recording on their own only after the discovery deadline had passed. They also sought sanctions. The attorney general's office answered that neither it nor the agency ever held a copy of the audio file before the plaintiff produced it. As of the most recent independent reporting, neither the appeal nor the motion had been publicly resolved.