Dunn County judge clarifies Ted Lopez sentence
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
MENOMONIE — A Dunn County judge has clarified the sentence for a 43-year-old former Boyceville man convicted of sex crimes involving children who is sentenced to more than 100 years in prison and more than 50 years of extended supervision.
Ted Lopez appeared through video conferencing from the Jackson Correctional Institute along with his attorney Megan Sanders-Drazen, who also appeared through video conferencing, before Judge Rod W. Smeltzer June 25.
Dunn County Assistant District Attorney Andrew Maki represented the prosecution.
At issue were concurrent or consecutive sentences and to which counts concurrent or consecutive applied.
Lopez is sentenced to 104 years of initial confinement in prison and 56 years and three months of extended supervision, but because some of the sentences are consecutive while others are concurrent, Lopez will actually serve 41 years of initial confinement and 22 years of extended supervision.
During a court hearing August 24, 2020, an error in the court transcript was corrected related to Lopez’s sentence in which one sentence could not be consecutive but had to be concurrent.
A sentence on one count also was 31 years and three months of initial confinement in prison but should have been 25 years in prison along with six years and three months of extended supervision.
Plea deal
Only days before Lopez was scheduled to go trial in February of 2019, 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.
The incidents for which Lopez reached a plea deal occurred in the Village of Boyceville between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2014.
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.
Trial
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 that began December 19, 2018.
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.
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.
Boyceville Police Chief Greg Lamkin also 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.
Bail
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 of his.
