By LeAnn R. Ralph
MENOMONIE — A 41-year-old former Boyceville man has been sentenced to 109 years in prison and 55 years of extended supervision all together for sex crimes involving children.
Ted Lopez appeared in Dunn County Circuit Court for a sentencing hearing March 29 before Judge Rod W. Smeltzer.
Some of the sentences for certain counts are concurrent and some are consecutive, so Lopez will actually spend 46 years in prison and be on extended supervision for 22 years.
The maximum sentence Lopez faced was 203 years.
The pre-sentence investigation recommended 60 years.
Only days before Lopez was scheduled to go trial in February, he reached a plea agreement with the Dunn County district attorney’s office.
While Judge Smeltzer accepted Lopez’s plea of no contest and found Lopez guilty of one felony count of child enticement causing mental and bodily harm and three felony counts of the possession of child pornography, the judge dismissed 18 remaining felony counts of the repeated sexual assault of the same child with at least three violations of first degree sexual assault, causing mental harm to a child, child sexual exploitation, causing a child less than 13 to view or listen to a sexual act, exposing a child to harmful material and multiple additional counts of the possession of child pornography.
Judge Smeltzer ordered the dismissed counts read into the record for sentencing.
Judge Smeltzer also dismissed a separate case of two felony counts of child sexual exploitation and exposing a child to harmful material and ordered those counts read into the record for sentencing as well.
In a separate case, a Dunn County jury found Lopez guilty on six felony counts related to the sexual assault of a six-year-old boy in Boyceville in 2009 and 2010 following a three-day jury trial in December.
The incidents for which Lopez reached a plea deal occurred in the Village of Boyceville between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2014.
The victim and his mother are satisfied with the guilty verdict and are agreeable to the plea deal to avoid the additional trauma to the victim of a jury trial, said
Andrea Nodolf, Dunn County district attorney, at the plea hearing in February.
Lopez was convicted at trial of the repeated sexual assault of the same child with at least three violations of first degree sexual assault; child enticement with sexual contact; exposing a child to harmful material; causing mental harm to a child; first degree child sexual assault involving intercourse with a child under the age of 12; and child enticement by giving or selling drugs.
In one of the cases, during an interview with the Chippewa Valley Child Advocacy Center in Eau Claire, a boy said he was five years old when “stuff started happening that was not good.” He went on to describe numerous sexual assaults and also said that he had watched pornography with Lopez. When asked if the pornography involved people over or under ten years of age, the boy said “maybe under,” according to the criminal complaint.
The additional counts for the possession of child pornography were associated with a Menomonie police department case, and on August 30, 2016, while executing a search warrant at Lopez’s home in Menomonie, a computer was seized. In addition to a number of documents that identified Lopez as the owner of the computer, the hard-drive also contained 3,000 images of child pornography, according to the complaint.
Boyceville Police Chief Greg Lamkin received reports from a social worker in Polk County in June of 2016 regarding an investigation of the repeated sexual assault of the same child, the complaint states.
The social worker had conducted a forensic interview with a 13-year-old boy. The sexual assaults had occurred in the Village of Boyceville when the boy was six or seven years old.
In addition to the initial confinement in prison and extended supervision, Lopez was ordered to pay$2,680 in court costs, $2,500 in DNA surcharges and a $1,500 fine for images of pornography.
Judge Smeltzer also ordered Lopez to have no contact with the victims, to comply with sex offender treatment, to not work with any children or where children are on the premises, and to have no contact with minors.
Lopez also can have written communication with his daughter until she is 18, the judge said.
Lopez’s attorney, Matthew Krische, argued for Lopez to be able to have communication with his daughter by telephone, too.
Judge Smeltzer denied the request.
Lopez will receive 387 days of credit for time served on one case, and 517 days of credit on the other case.
In 2017, Lopez skipped out on a $55,000 cash bail posted in Dunn County but was located and arrested in Minnesota in March of 2018.
Alma and Santiago Lopez, the parents of Ted Lopez, posted the $55,000 cash bail and had borrowed part of the money from family friends.
Judge Smeltzer ordered a forfeiture of $20,000 of the cash bail in September of 2017 and ordered the forfeiture of an additional $15,000 in February of 2018.
Santiago Lopez told the court during the February of 2018 hearing that he and his wife had lived in Puerto Rico but they had sold their house and had moved to the United States to help take care of their granddaughter.
Lopez signed a cash bond in Dunn County for $250,000 on April 23, 2018. He was never able to post the cash bail and was in custody at the time his trial started on December 19, 2018.
