Part 2: Close political associates of a convicted child sex offender sat on the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council. A top prosecutor chaired the meetings. Now three of the officials responsible are asking voters to keep them in office.
By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader
It was a parent’s worst nightmare. A social worker called on the last day of spring break. A mother’s 15-year-old daughter had reported her stepfather, a Silicon Valley NASA engineer, for sexual abuse.
“Maddy” has been living under a family court order that placed her and her younger half-siblings in custody of Maddy’s stepfather, Bryan, during a protracted divorce case with their mother. For four years, family court orders required Maddy to see her mother only when a paid professional supervised visitation monitor was present.
On Friday morning, a social worker told Maddy’s mother that Bryan would be arrested by Sunnyvale police that same day. However, because the family court orders were still in effect, the children would not be coming home to her. Instead, they would be placed in the county’s foster care system.
When Maddy’s uncle and maternal grandparents, survivors of the Vietnam War with deep roots in San Jose and no criminal history, asked to take the children, the social worker said no.
Bryan posted bail and was released from the county jail the same day he was arrested. Maddy and her younger siblings were not so fortunate. They spent Friday cycling through detention facilities, and by Saturday had been separated and placed in foster homes scattered across San Jose and beyond. It was unclear whether any of them would be back in school with their classmates on Monday.
Two county social workers, speaking to the Vanguard on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that county policy requires placing children with family before turning to the foster care system. The decision to bypass that policy, both said, appeared driven by fear of public scrutiny rather than any honest assessment of Maddy’s family and their ability to care for the children.
That scrutiny had arrived a day before Bryan’s arrest, when the San Jose Mercury News published a story about a 2-year-old boy who died after Santa Clara County Child Protective Services, (CPS), placed him with a relative who had a prior felony conviction for child endangerment. A 17-year-old in the same home was also accused of sexually abusing the toddler before his death.
County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas and Child Abuse Prevention Council member Steve Baron were quoted expressing outrage that CPS had failed to vet the placement. The Mercury did not report that Arenas, as a county supervisor, chaired the local government committee responsible for overseeing the county’s social services and child support agencies, including CPS.
Both the toddler’s death and Maddy’s case unfolded in April, the same month the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors declared Child Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month.This is part two of the Secrets of a Child Molester at City Hall. A series originally published by the Vanguard News Group.
Public records show Maddy’s stepfather booked in the county jail on Friday, April 17th.
THE PLAYERS: WHO IS BREAKING THE SYSTEM
To understand how Maddy ended up in foster care instead of her grandparents’ San Jose home, is to understand who took power in Santa Clara County in 2022 and what they did with it.
That year, Sylvia Arenas was elected as a Santa Clara County Supervisor. Omar Torres and Peter Ortiz were elected to the San Jose City Council. Jeff Rosen was elected to a fourth term as Santa Clara County District Attorney. That same year, Maddy’s parents filed their divorce.
During his 2022 political campaign, Peter Ortiz claimed to reside at a property on Lyndale Avenue on the east side of San Jose in District 5. A property Omar Torres and his romantic partner, Nicholas Aguilar, had purchased in 2021 as previously reported.
Torres was required by California law to disclose rental income in his campaign filings. He reported no income from Ortiz during the period Ortiz claimed the Lyndale property as his primary residence.
Throughout their first year in office, Torres and Ortiz made frequent public appearances together, presenting themselves as champions of San Jose’s Latino, Vietnamese and LGBTQ communities.
By mid-2023, a journalist operating under the name East Side San Jose Times on social media began posting criticism of how Torres and Ortiz were handling issues related to children in San Jose’s east side communities.
Ortiz and his partner, Brenda Zendejas, labeled criticism as hate speech. The couple filed complaints that resulted in the journalist’s platform being canceled and demonetized. When the journalist rebuilt, Ortiz went to court.
As previously reported, Ortiz filed a civil harassment lawsuit in 2023, claiming the social media posts about him, and Omar Torres, constituted harassment and incited violence against Zendejas and her children. While Ortiz’s lawsuit was eventually thrown out of court, he initially obtained a temporary restraining order that barred the journalist from reporting on his political activities and from attending public meetings where Ortiz was present.
The temporary order was in effect as Ortiz was nominated and appointed to the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council months later, preventing the journalist from covering, or even attending, the very meetings where Ortiz claimed to represent the interests of abused children.
While county supervisors declared a month of child abuse awareness, three children spent their last days of spring break in foster care — separated from their mother, their grandparents and their classmates — because the systems built to protect them was too broken, too political, or too busy protecting themselves.
CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION COUNCIL: PROTECTING PREDATORS AND POWER
The Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council, known as the CAPC, is the county body responsible for shaping how local agencies prevent child abuse, respond to allegations and communicate with the public about child safety. Its members influence policy across law enforcement, social services and public education. The council operates under the Children, Seniors and Families Committee, a local government body chaired by Supervisor Syliva Arenas.
In April 2024, Arenas submitted a formal nomination to the Board of Supervisors recommending Ortiz for appointment to the CAPC. Twenty-four days later, Ortiz’s appointment was confirmed.
Before Ortiz was formally introduced as a CAPC appointee, on May 10, 2024, two parents addressed the council during public comment.
A father told the council that, like Maddy’s mother, family court orders had cut him off from a child he said was being sexually abused. He looked to the room full of appointed officials and asked directly: who here will help?
A mother described how family court had separated her from her son. She told the council about the emotional devastation of losing contact with her child through a court process, and the lasting harm it had done to both of them.
Neither received a response. After their comments, CAPC chairperson, James Gibbons-Shapiro, announced Ortiz’s appointment. Ortiz spoke briefly about prior experience on school boards in the county.
Gibbons-Shapiro is the highest-ranking line prosecutor in the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office. He chaired both the CAPC and its membership committee, the body responsible for vetting who sits on the council and its subcommittees.
Already sitting on the CAPC’s Disproportionality Subcommittee at the time of Ortiz’s appointment was Nicholas Aguilar, Torres’s partner, political supporter and co-owner of the Lyndale Avenue property where Ortiz claimed to reside as he was elected to the City Council in 2022.
No nomination document or formal Board of Supervisors appointment record for Aguilar has been located in any public record the county has produced in response to records requests.
During his service on the CAPC subcommittee, Aguilar worked as a court-appointed advocate for foster youth in Santa Clara County.
As Torres was investigated, prosecuted and sentenced to prison for child sexual abuse, two of his closest associates — Peter Ortiz and Nicholas Aguilar — sat on the county’s child abuse prevention council. A prosecutor overseeing that prosecution chaired the meetings and said nothing about the conflict.
TORRES FALLS – HIS ASSOICATES STAY PUT
Two months after Ortiz joined the CAPC, his close associate, councilman Omar Torres, became the subject of a child sex abuse investigation by the San Jose Police Department.
San Jose Spotlight, a local nonprofit online newsroom, broke that story in October 2024, and the political world around Torres quickly collapsed. Spotlight’s reporting did not include information about Aguilar and Ortiz sitting on the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council at the time the Torres scandal unfolded.
Torres resigned from the City Council. He was arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to child sex abuse involving his own cousin. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The case was separate from the one initially investigated by police in 2024.
Throughout the Torres criminal investigation, arrest, guilty plea and sentencing, Ortiz and Aguilar remained on the county’s child abuse prevention council.
As previously reported, after Torres’ conviction, the Lyndale Avenue property Torres owned with Aguilar, where Ortiz once claimed to reside, was transferred into Aguilar’s name. Legal observers who reviewed the transfer told the Vanguard the transaction appeared structured to shield Torres’s assets from restitution obligations owed to a victim of child sexual abuse.
Torres’ two closest associates each benefited from a property he owned while he was being prosecuted for child sex abuse. Both men remain on the county’s child abuse prevention council in 2026.
Since the Vanguard first reported on that transfer, the district attorney has announced no investigation, no indictment and no arrest in connection with it. According to public records, Aguilar and Ortiz remain on CAPC as Ortiz is running for re- election in 2026.
ORTIZ’S FAILING GRADE IN PUBLIC SERVICE
Public records obtained through the California Public Records Act document how Ortiz engaged with the CAPC after his appointment. Of the 11 CAPC meetings held during his tenure, Ortiz was absent or late to seven.
Aguilar, whose presence on a CAPC subcommittee has no traceable appointment record, was voted in as co-chair of the Disproportionality Subcommittee at the July 11, 2025 meeting — as the prosecution of Torres was concluding.
Child Abuse Prevention Council — Peter Ortiz & Nicholas Aguilar
Source: CPRA Production 2026, County of Santa Clara | Compiled by the Vanguard Investigative Unit
| SANTA CLARA COUNTY — CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION COUNCIL | ||
| ATTENDANCE RECORD | Source: CPRA Production 2026 | ||
| MEETING DATE & TYPE | PETER ORTIZ — Seat 20, Councilmember | NICHOLAS AGUILAR — Disproportionality Subcommittee |
| — 2024 — | ||
| May 10, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✓ PRESENT 1st meeting after appointment | — NOT A MEMBER |
| June 14, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✓ PRESENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| July 12, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✓ PRESENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| August 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | — CANCELLED No quorum | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Sept 13, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✗ ABSENT Torres investigation goes public | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Sept 13, 2024 CAPC Special Meeting | ✗ ABSENT Also cancelled — no quorum | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Oct 11, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✗ ABSENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Nov 8, 2024 CAPC Regular Meeting | ◔ LATE Arrived 7:36 a.m. — month Torres arrested | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Dec 6, 2024 CAPC Special Meeting | ◔ LATE Arrived 7:35 a.m. | — NOT A MEMBER |
| — 2025 — | ||
| Jan 10, 2025 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✗ ABSENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Feb 14, 2025 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✗ ABSENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| Mar 14, 2025 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✓ PRESENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| May 9, 2025 CAPC Regular Meeting | ✗ ABSENT | — NOT A MEMBER |
| July 11, 2025 Disproportionality Subcomm. | — NOT A MEMBER | ✓ PRESENT Voted in as co-chair |
| ORTIZ SUMMARY | Present: 5 Absent: 6 Late: 2 Cancelled: 2 | |
| NOTE ON AGUILAR: No formal nomination or Board of Supervisors appointment document for Nicholas Aguilar has been located in any public record. Aguilar appears in CAPC Disproportionality Subcommittee minutes only as a Community Member. James Gibbons-Shapiro, who chaired both the CAPC and its membership committee throughout the Torres prosecution, has not addressed publicly how Aguilar — one of Torres’s closest associates — came to hold an advisory role with influence over county child abuse prevention policy. | ||
KEY: ✓ Present = Confirmed in roll call. ✗ Absent = Listed absent in official minutes. ◔ Late = Arrived after meeting start, time noted. — Cancelled = No quorum / no meeting held.
TAMMANY HALL IN SILICON VALLEY VS. THE PUBLIC RIGHT TO KNOW
In the course of investigating Torres, San Jose police detectives uncovered a group text thread on his confiscated phone labeled “Tammany Hall.” The name was not chosen by accident. The original Tammany Hall was a 19th-century New York political machine notorious for corruption, patronage and using government power for personal gain. That a group of San Jose elected officials and their associates chose that name for their private chat says something about how they saw themselves.
According to a lawsuit San Jose Spotlight filed October 2025, five law enforcement sources confirmed the Tammany Hall chat involved Peter Ortiz, Councilmember Domingo Candelas, Candelas’s chief of staff Teddy Adera, Omar Torres, Brenda Zendejas of the San Jose Downtown Business Association and Huascar Castro, director of Housing and Transportation at Working Partnerships USA.
Police sources told Spotlight the thread included the N-word and the word “scraps,” a slur directed at Mexican nationals, used while members discussed San Jose neighborhoods and the people living in them. Those neighborhoods are, in many cases, the same east side communities Ortiz was elected to represent on the City Council and as an appointee on the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council.
Children like Maddy, a Mexican Vietnamese American teen, live in those neighborhoods, yet they have no idea what Ortiz may have said about them.
Spotlight filed three separate California Public Records Act requests for the Tammany Hall messages. The city denied the first, delayed the second and closed the third the day after granting itself a two-week extension to search for records. The San Jose Police Department refused to confirm the messages even existed, citing law enforcement exemptions. Spotlight’s attorneys argue in the lawsuit that those exemptions do not apply. Noting, messages in which elected officials discuss the neighborhoods they represent and the constituents who live in them are public records. They belong to the public, not to the officials who wrote them.
The California Constitution was amended in 2004 to state plainly that the writings of public officials and the meetings of public bodies shall be open to public scrutiny. San Jose’s own Sunshine Ordinance, Resolution No. 77135, calls public access to city records a fundamental and necessary right. The city is currently paying outside lawyers to make sure that right goes unenforced.
The Vanguard has separately requested that the county produce the Torres communications. The District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted Torres, would have obtained those messages as part of the criminal case and would have full knowledge of their contents, yet the messages do not appear in the public court file. The Vanguard’s request is based on the grounds that the messages are relevant to the integrity of child sex abuse prosecutions in the county, to potential public corruption involving elected officials, and to the conduct of those officials in both their public roles and their political campaigns. That request has not been fulfilled.
The public has a fundamental right to know what the people they elect say about them when no one is watching. In Santa Clara County, that right is being blocked in court by the city and quietly set aside by a district attorney’s office that holds the answers and has chosen silence.
The public has a right to know what Peter Ortiz said to a convicted child sex abuser about the children and families he was appointed to represent on the county’s child abuse prevention council.
MADDY REPORT: NO VOICE FOR SURVIVORS OF CHILD SEX ABUSE IN SILICON VALLEY
Maddy spoke up to her therapist. Her therapist did her job. Police arrested Maddy’s stepfather Friday morning. He was out of jail by Friday night.
Maddy and her siblings were not so fortunate.
While their stepfather posted bail and went home, the children spent Friday cycling through county detention facilities. By the weekend they had been separated and placed in different foster homes, cut off from the extended family members who were ready and willing to take them in.
According to confidential sources, Maddy’s stepfather was released Friday, made contact with his victim, and was expected to return to his job at NASA on Monday morning. Maddy and her younger siblings, meanwhile, were living with strangers in separate homes with no clear answer about when or whether they would return to school, or home.
Family court orders kept Maddy from her mother. Her grandparents, aunts and uncles, all members of a Vietnamese immigrant family with no criminal records and decades of roots in San Jose, asked to take the children. The county said no. No county official was able to cite a specific policy to support that decision.
Instead of spending the final days of spring break surrounded by family, friends and classmates, Maddy and her siblings were processed through the foster care system of one of California’s wealthiest counties. That same system had just been publicly criticized for placing a toddler with a convicted felon who later endangered the child’s life.
The father who stood before the CAPC on the day Ortiz was appointed asked who would help protect his sexually abused child. He received no answer.
The mother who described losing custody of her son received no follow-up.
Maddy spent the last days of her spring break in foster care in a county where elected officials have faced no accountability for the harm their choices have caused children.
These are not exceptions. They are what happens when the people running a county’s child protection institutions are more loyal to each other and to the political network that placed them in power than to the children those institutions exist to serve.
Santa Clara County Foster Care and Family Court Services Offices. Photo by Susan Bassi
THREE PUBLIC OFFICIALS. THREE POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS. ZERO ANSWERS
Three people seeking election in Santa Clara County in 2026 have refused to answer the questions this investigation raises.
Sylvia Arenas nominated Ortiz to the CAPC and is running for reelection as supervisor. She has not explained why she chose him, what she knew about his associations with Torres at the time, or why she has taken no action on the CAPC’s composition in the two years since Torres’ conviction.
Jeff Rosen is seeking a fifth term as district attorney. His office prosecuted Torres, only after police obtained a recorded confession. His office holds the Tammany Hall text messages and employs the senior prosecutor who chaired the CAPC throughout the Torres investigation while two of Torres’ closest associates sat on the council beside him. Rosen has not addressed any of it as he is asking voters to return him to the position of the county’s most powerful law enforcement officer.
Peter Ortiz is asking voters to return him to the City Council. During his time on the CAPC, he was absent or late to seven of 11 meetings. He spent three years using the courts to silence a journalist reporting on his conduct. He has never publicly acknowledged Torres’ crimes. He has never explained his own role on the CAPC during the investigation. He has never responded to questions about the Tammany Hall messages.
Maddy deserves better. The father who asked the CAPC for help deserves better. The mother who lost custody of her son deserves better. The children of east San Jose’s Vietnamese and Latino communities, whose neighborhoods were allegedly discussed in a private group chat named after a corrupt political machine, deserve better.
They are who this system is supposed to serve. In Santa Clara County in 2026, they are who the system is failing.
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