Royal City man gets 15 months for assaulting young girl

ROYAL CITY — A Royal City man will be spending over a year in prison for sexually assaulting a young girl.

Filomeno Calderón Jiménez, 38, of Royal City, entered an In Re Barr plea in Grant County Superior Court to third-degree assault of a child-sexual motivation and was sentenced to a total of 15 months in prison. The In Re Barr plea indicates Calderón Jiménez is not pleading guilty to the crime he is pleading to and there is no factual basis for the charge. He believes there is a substantial risk of being convicted of the initial counts he was charged with if the case were to proceed to trial.

Authorities were first notified of the abuse by Child Protective Services. The victim described several instances of abuse by Calderón Jiménez at an apartment in the 400 block of Cherry Street in Royal City. The girl noted four different occasions when Calderón Jiménez made her perform oral sex on him, the first of which occurred in 2015 and the last in the summer of 2017. She also described several instances of inappropriate touching and said “I wanted to tell someone but he always told me he would do something to me if I did.”

The victim was initially interviewed back in June 2017 about a similar case, but did not want to talk about the abuse and said she didn’t tell officers about it initially because she was scared. In late March the Royal City Police Department received an anonymous tip that Calderón Jiménez was in the 3100 block of Road 14.7 Southeast, near Othello, and he was taken into custody.

Richard Byrd can be reached via email at city@columbiabasinherald.com.