Jailed 11 days, Iowan says he never should have been charged with sex abuse

Matthew Rodrigues spent 11 days in the Dallas County Jail last month accused of sex abuse before authorities changed their minds.

He was released May 9 when Judge Randy Hefner wrote in an order that new evidence showed he was not the assailant who pinned a woman to her bed April 29 at Motel 6 in West Des Moines and sexually assaulted her.

The same day, Salvador Junior Pineda was booked into jail and charged with the crime.

Now, Rodrigues wants to know why he was ever charged, particularly when investigators had access to surveillance video from the motel lobby that allegedly shows the assailant.

That video was a key reason the case against Rodrigues was dismissed, according to his fiancée, Anna Reynolds. She took on the task of clearing his name after the arrest, even visiting the motel to talk to employees who were there the night of the alleged assault. 

According to Reynolds, West Des Moines police Officer Jason Heintz told her in a phone conversation approximately one day before her fiancé was released that the surveillance video showed that Rodrigues did not match the attacker.

This detail and others leave Rodrigues, Reynolds and his attorney chafing at the suggestion that it was new evidence that freed him. They say authorities should have had the pieces necessary to cross him off the suspect list, or at least prompt more questions, much earlier in the investigation. 

Rodrigues, who is of Portuguese descent, believes he was arrested and held for 11 days based on two factors: He was at the motel that night, and he has the same dark complexion as the accused attacker.  

“It’s the same evidence; you guys just didn’t look into it,” Rodrigues said of the West Des Moines Police Department in a recent interview at his apartment. “You guys just thought, ‘Oh, there’s a Mexican out front. I’m going to arrest him because that has to be him.’ That’s what it came down to. They didn’t have no evidence.”

Repeated requests by the Register to West Des Moines police and the Dallas County Attorney's Office to discuss the circumstances that led to Rodrigues' arrest and the decision to dismiss the charges against him have been refused.

The night of the arrest

Police reports from the night of the assault provide a glimpse into the investigation.

West Des Moines police Officer Andree Owen responded to an emergency call around 12:33 a.m. April 29 about a sexual assault at Motel 6, tucked behind a McDonald’s restaurant off Jordan Creek Parkway.

A dispatcher relayed information that a Hispanic male “pacing” outside the hotel in front of the lobby could be a potential suspect, she wrote in her report. Two officers were already speaking with a man outside when Owen pulled into the parking lot.

Owen found the woman who said she was assaulted. She was with a motel employee, “crying and shaking” behind the front desk, according to the report. The woman had “mascara and tears running down her face (and) red marks all over her neck and chest.”

In interviews at the motel and an hour later at a Des Moines hospital, the woman told Owen and patrol Officer Aaron Swenson the details of the attack.   

Attempts by a reporter to reach the woman were unsuccessful. The Register typically does not identify people who say they were victims of sexual assault or abuse. 

The woman told the officers that she was from a town in southeast Iowa, but she had been staying at the Motel 6 for a “few weeks.” She met her assailant — whom she knew as “JR” — for the first time in the motel lobby around 11:30 p.m. that night.

The woman said she was talking to the front desk manager when the man approached, eventually asking for her phone number and if she knew where he could “possibly get some drugs,” according to the report. She said she didn’t use drugs or know where to get them, but she let him inside her third-floor motel room because he “seemed nice,” Owen wrote.

Inside the room, the two sat on the bed and watched TV for about 10 minutes before the man stood up and asked for a hug, according to the report. When she stood to embrace him, the man pulled his arms around her, threw her onto the bed and pinned her down, according to the report.  

The attacker pulled down her leggings and underwear far enough that he was able to penetrate her with his fingers “two or three times,” Owen wrote. The woman fought back, but the man pushed her up against the wall and wrapped a hand around her throat as he tried to take off his pants.

The woman said she could smell alcohol on her attacker’s breath, Owen wrote in the report.

The woman punched her attacker in the face, causing him to fall backwards and allowing her to get her phone and call the front desk. The man “grabbed his phone and cigarettes” and ran out the door, according to the report.

The woman gave the two officers several pieces of identifying information about her assailant. The attacker had told the woman that he was staying on the first floor of the motel temporarily while he was working a construction job. He gave her a telephone number with an Atlanta area code, the officer wrote.

The woman told police the attacker was wearing a gray shirt with “Houston” emblazoned on it in orange lettering, gray shorts and black tennis shoes. 

Owen noted in her report that the woman was “very consistent with what she told Officer Swenson and I … while still being very visibly shaken and tearful while speaking with us.”

'My name's not Junior'

Rodrigues grew up in Boston but moved to Iowa approximately two years ago after meeting Reynolds, who grew up in Des Moines. The couple previously lived together in the Washington, D.C., area. They have twin 4-year-old daughters. 

According to Rodrigues’ account of the night, he and Reynolds had an argument and he left their apartment on EP True Parkway with two friends sometime between 11:30 p.m. and midnight. The group went to a convenience store off Jordan Creek Parkway and drove to a Clive car wash before ending up at the motel, he said.  

Rodrigues said the group went to the motel that night to hang out with a friend who was staying there. He estimates he was in his friend's first-floor room for only 5 minutes before going outside to smoke a cigarette and call his fiancée.

That's when he was approached by two West Des Moines police officers. Owen's report and court records indicate they were patrol officers Travis Fisher and David Johnson.

Rodrigues said Officer Johnson called him "Junior" as he approached. 

“I said, ‘Here’s my phone,'” Rodrigues recalled. “If you can call anybody on this phone that can identify me as Junior, so be it. But my name’s not Junior. My name is Matthew.”

Officers took his phone and told Rodrigues he was “being detained” after he tried to film the encounter, he said. He was placed in the back of a patrol car.

When the officers asked if he’d like to speak with them, he responded that he wanted to speak with an attorney.

Rodrigues said his two friends approached police, explaining that they had been with him throughout the night. The officers told the pair to leave, Rodrigues said. 

According to Rodrigues, the officers never told him the exact nature of the crime they were investigating, simply referring to it as an assault. At least one of the officers told Rodrigues that he was identified as a suspect because they had reviewed surveillance video that implicated him, he said.

Both Rodrigues and his attorney, Andrew Heiting-Doane, said they want to know what surveillance video the officers reviewed that night, if any, before making the arrest.

West Des Moines police Sgt. Anthony Giampolo, a spokesperson for the department, declined to speak with a reporter about the case. He referred a reporter to Des Moines attorney Jason Palmer, who said the department is investigating the incident. 

"The City of West Des Moines and its Police Department are conducting an investigation into Mr. Rodrigues’s arrest," Palmer said in an email. "Due to the pending criminal charges, the ongoing investigation, and an allegation of wrongdoing made on behalf of Mr. Rodrigues, the City of West Des Moines has no further comment at this time."

As Rodrigues sat in the vehicle, the officers never asked the woman who said she was attacked to identify him as her assailant. He saw a woman he now believes was her as officers escorted a woman from the motel to an ambulance.

Steve Foritano, a retired former assistant Polk County attorney who oversaw prosecutions of violent crimes and sex abuse cases, said it would not be unusual in cases where a suspect is detained quickly for authorities to ask a victim to make an in-person identification. Foritano said victims also might be asked to identify an assailant through a photograph, but both Rodrigues and Heiting-Doane question whether investigators made an effort to do so before the arrest.

According to Owen’s report, Rodrigues was taken to the Dallas County Jail in Adel around 1:40 a.m. on charges of third-degree sexual abuse and assault causing injury.

A preliminary hearing was scheduled for May 9, when a judge would determine whether there was probable cause to move forward with charges. Judge Hefner on May 5 denied a request from Rodrigues and his court-appointed attorney to change his $10,000 cash-only bond so he could be released while the case was pending.

“I’ve got my kids asking me every day why ain’t I home,” Rodrigues said.

Fiancée: Video showed different man

Reynolds, 23, who works for a financial institution, said she realized something was wrong when she obtained a copy of Owen’s written report from the police department.

The details she read did not match anything she knew about her fiancé, she said.

The woman “could smell alcohol” on the breath of her assailant, the report said. Both Rodrigues and Reynolds said he does not like the taste of alcohol and drinks only on rare occasions. Rodrigues maintains that neither officer who questioned him at the scene asked if he had been drinking or requested that he take a breathalyzer test.

The woman reported her assailant wore a shirt with the word “Houston” on it.

“I know every single piece of clothing that Matthew has,” Reynolds said. “I pretty much do his shopping for him, so I knew right away from the clothing.”

Additionally, Reynolds said the phone number the attacker gave the woman did not match Rodrigues’ number. A reporter’s call to the phone number in the report ended with an automated message saying the person who had the number was not available.

Rodrigues and his attorney question whether investigators tried to definitively link the phone number to Rodrigues before charging him. Rodrigues said his phone was not taken as evidence by police. It was returned to him along with the clothes he was wearing that night when he left the Dallas County Jail.

Reynolds said she twice contacted West Des Moines police with her concerns, including once after she visited Motel 6 and talked with a hotel staff member who she says shared concerns about whether the right person was arrested.

According to Reynolds, the female motel employee said she'd seen the man who approached the woman in the lobby before the attack. That man was still staying at the motel as a guest following Rodrigues’ arrest, Reynolds said.

The following week — one day before Rodrigues was set to appear at the May 9 preliminary hearing — Reynolds said she received a call from Heintz, who told her about his review of the video.

“I remember him saying that his main focus was to get the evidence to the district attorney before or on … the day of his next hearing,” Reynolds said in a text message to a reporter.

The preliminary hearing never happened. Rodrigues was released from the jail and the charges were dismissed.

Dallas County Attorney Wayne Reisetter declined to speak about his office’s decision to dismiss the charges against Rodrigues, citing the ongoing case against Pineda, which is scheduled to go to trial in August.

“Any discussion about the subject you want to visit about is inevitably going to result in additional news regarding the current prosecution and to avoid unnecessarily churning things in that new prosecution I am not going to visit with you about the former one,” he said in a voicemail message to a reporter.  

Pineda, 26, from Houston, Texas, remains in the Dallas County Jail facing charges of second-degree sex abuse and assault with intent to commit sexual abuse. He has two previous felony convictions, for evading arrest and a graffiti charge, in Texas. He has pleaded not guilty to his charges in Iowa.

Todd Miler, a court-appointed attorney representing Pineda, declined to speak with a reporter about the case.

“The only bit of information I can share is that Mr. Pineda has asserted his innocence and we are progressing towards a trial,” he said.

Rodrigues and his attorney are considering filing a lawsuit against the police department. They want any trace of the sexual abuse charge scrubbed from the Iowa Courts Online database. Though he no longer faces criminal charges, Rodrigues worries about the stigma he could face from employers or family members simply for once being accused of the attack.

“I want closure on why (they) arrested me," he said. "That's all I want to know."