Lyndale Avenue sign in East San Jose on March 14, 2026. Photo by Susan Bassi
By Susan Bassi, Fred Johnson and Faith Strader
In East San Jose, where trucks sit parked on front lawns, abandoned cars clog the streets, neighborhood schools are shuttered and graffiti marks the working-class neighborhood, a modest house on Lyndale Avenue stands out. Fresh paint, new windows, a new roof and a meticulously manicured yard frame the property, anchored by a peach tree that blooms behind the house each spring.
The home was purchased in 2021 by Omar Torres, who became the first openly gay Latino elected to the San Jose City Council in 2022. Before completing his first term, however, Torres was arrested and convicted of child sexual abuse.
By 2026 Torres had been sentenced to 18 years in prison and ordered to pay his victim $780,000 in restitution.
Nicholas “Nick” Aguilar, a court-appointed advocate for foster youth in Santa Clara County, purchased the home with Torres in 2021, while working for the nonprofit Child Advocates of Silicon Valley.
Before Torres’ arrest, Aguilar had been appointed to the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council (CAPC). According to Aguilar’s LinkedIn profile, he served on the county political body alongside the same law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and probation department officials involved in his partner’s criminal prosecution.
Then in 2025, as Torres awaited sentencing and a restitution order determining how much he would owe to the victim, Torres’ interest in the Lyndale property was quietly transferred to Aguilar — placing the asset beyond the reach of the child sexual abuse victim entitled to compensation for the harm Torres had inflicted.
As of Friday, the county said no records exist of Aguilar’s financial conflict-of-interest disclosures or public records explaining how he was appointed to CAPC and elevated to a committee chair position during his partner’s criminal prosecution.
When asked about public documents showing Torres’ interest in the Lyndale property transferring to Aguilar, Santa Clara County District Attorney, Jeff Rosen, and the prosecutor he assigned to the criminal prosecution of Omar Torres, Deputy District Attorney (DDA) Malinsky, failed to respond to multiple requests for comment.
When asked about the Lyndale property transfer, and an upcoming April 10 asset disclosure hearing, Torres’ criminal defense attorney, Nelson McElmurry, said- “i don’t rep him anymore and have no interest in commenting on this.” , in a written statement.
The criminal court docket shows McElmurry as the attorney of record as of March 13, 2026, with no pending motion to be relieved by the court.
Today the house on Lyndale Avenue represents a contradiction that results in troubling failures inside the region’s justice system. A long-running pattern of problems within the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, similar in some respects to issues unfolding nationally in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the scrutiny facing the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi, over its handling of victims of child sexual abuse.
Critics say the pattern reflects a system that often disrespects and deprives crime victims of rights guaranteed under state and federal law.
The Santa Clara County Victim Witness Assistance Program, overseen by Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen since 2015, has faced repeated criticism over staffing shortages, high turnover and, in one case, the misuse of public resources in connection with the Bay Area police misconduct scandal involving Celeste Guap.
“FBI has turned its back on survivor victims…the FBI was negligent in its Epstein investigation, the complaint alleges, claiming the agency knew he was abusing and sex trafficking young women and children and allowed the abuse to continue unchecked.” -Miami Herald Investigative Reporter Julie K. Brown
From a 2015 civil grand jury report to a violent stabbing involving a former San Jose Mercury News reporter and the recent “Los Gatos Party Mom” case, victims of sexual assault, violence and abuse say the district attorney’s victim services office is a “hot mess”.
In Santa Clara County, victims are often treated as a nuisance, rather than as active participants of the legal process, despite state and federal laws requiring their involvement and protection.
For families affected by cycles of generational sexual violence and abuse, the house on Lyndale Avenue — and the men who owned it — have come to represent a microcosm of Silicon Valley power, politics and preferential treatment that mirrors broader concerns now emerging nationally from investigations tied to Jeffrey Epstein.
This article is the first installment in “Secrets of a Child Molester at City Hall,” an investigative reporting series centered in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley. A series originally published by Vanguard News Group, and through hyper local reporting on social media @SusanBassi.
Politics, Policing and Investigating Pedophiles
In the summer of 2024, San Jose City Councilmember Omar Torres, traveled to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention (DNC) as a delegate from Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s congressional district, casting his vote to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
Upon his return, Torres reported to San Jose Police that he was being extorted and stalked by a Chicago man by the name of Terry Beeks. San Jose Police Detective Mark Miten of the Silicon Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Unit was assigned to the case.
Torres gave police his communications with Beeks. Specifically, communications related to an 11-year-old autistic boy Torres told Beeks was his son. Torres was never known to have had a son.
Detective Miten signed an affidavit in support of a search warrant to gain permission to place a GPS tracker on Torres’ car on October 1, 2024. The related court documents became public eight days later.
As news of Miten’s affidavit broke, powerful politicians, labor union leaders and members of San Jose’s Police Officer Association began calling for Torres’ resignation.
Two days later, a quick claim deed gifting Torres’ interest in the Lyndale Avenue property to Nicholas Aguilar, was quietly drafted, but not signed.
“I am currently investigating a case involving oral copulation of a minor … and having an abnormal interest in children,” Minten wrote in the affidavit.
As calls for Torres’ resignation persisted, a victim unfamiliar to police, suddenly emerged.
Confessions of A Child Molester Recorded on Police Body Cameras
After seeing reports on social media detailing a child sex abuse investigation involving Torres and an 11-year-old autistic boy, Adrian — with the support of his wife of eight years, walked into the San Jose Police Department. He reported what Torres had done to him throughout much of his childhood.
Detective Miten, who had been investigating Torres for months, attended the police interviews and asked Adrian and his wife to call Torres. Police would be recording the call on body cameras.
The couple agreed.
Torres answered.
Resignation, Arrest and Political Loss
The next morning, on November 5, 2024, Omar Torres resigned his District 3 seat on the San Jose City Council.
By mid – afternoon he was arrested.
That night, Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump.
Criminal Prosecution of a Child Sex Abuser
Omar Torres was charged with three felony counts of child sex abuse related crimes- sodomy by use of force, oral copulation by force, violence, duress, menace, or fear, and lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 by force.
He was denied bail. The criminal case moved quickly.
Plea Deal: Did Court Appointed Advocate Steal Child Sex Abuse Victim Restitution Assets?
Omar Torres pleaded guilty to the crimes he had confessed in a phone call to his victim. He signed the plea form with his attorney, Nelson McElmurry, on April 8, 2025.
By taking a plea deal, Torres was effectively convicted of three felony counts that included sodomy by use of force, oral copulation by force, violence, duress, menace or fear, and lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 by force.
“The victim stated when the Suspect Torres called him in 2008, he asked for forgiveness.” -San Jose Police Department Report taken by Officer Miten November 4, 2024
Once the plea was accepted, the conviction became final and Torres was required to pay for his crimes.
However, the children in the photos that had captured Detective Miten’s attention in the fall of 2024, were not addressed in the criminal proceedings, except as exhibits filed in advance of Torres’ sentencing hearing on August 29, 2025.
Unlike fines paid to the government, victim restitution is a debt owed directly to the victim of the crime. Courts may order payment for therapy, counseling, lost wages, relocation expenses and other losses tied to the harm caused by the offense, particularly in sexual-abuse cases where the psychological consequences can persist for years, or decades.
The obligation is intended to ensure that the person responsible for the harm — not the victim or taxpayers — bears the financial cost of recovery.
To enforce that obligation, the plea form requires defendants to disclose their financial assets.
The purpose is straightforward: courts cannot ensure victims are compensated if defendants conceal or transfer property before restitution is determined. Asset disclosure requirements are designed to prevent defendants from shielding money or real estate by moving assets to family members or associates while a criminal case is pending.
However, even when courts issue restitution orders, collecting the money can be difficult.
A Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury investigation found that victims frequently struggle to obtain the compensation courts say they are owed, concluding that the county’s restitution system “lacks sufficient effectiveness to keep the promise first made to victims in 1982” when California voters adopted the state’s Victims’ Bill of Rights.
“The promise of restitution remains largely unfulfilled,” the grand jury concluded over a decade before Torres signed the plea deal and became a convicted child sex offender.
Dirty Deeds of Child Sex Abuser and his Court Appointed Advocate Partner
As Torres awaited sentencing and restitution hearings, public records show his brother Edgar, his sister Jacquiline and his partner Nicholas Aguilar, quietly executed a real estate transfer involving the East San Jose Lyndale Avenue property.
Shortly before his sentencing hearing, Torres transferred his 35 percent ownership interest in the house to Aguilar through a quitclaim deed.
The deed itself tells a revealing timeline.
The deed was originally prepared and dated Oct. 12, 2024, days after Detective Mark Minten’s affidavit described the initial child sexual-abuse investigation.
However, the document was not executed until Aug. 25, 2025, when Torres’ relatives signed on his behalf as “attorneys-in-fact “and transferred his interest in the property four days before his sentencing hearing.
The timing is critical.
Before the court could determine how much Torres owed in victim restitution, the only asset publicly linked Torres had been transferred to Nicholas Aguilar.
Politics of a Child Sex Offender’s Partne
In addition to purchasing the Lyndale Avenue property with Torres in 2021, Nicholas Aguilar was frequently referenced during Torres’ 2022 political campaign as his partner of four years and, at times, as his fiancé.
According reporting by the San José Spotlight, Aguilar worked in Santa Clara County’s foster-care system as a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for Child Advocates of Silicon Valley (CASV), a nonprofit where volunteers are assigned by judges to advocate for children in dependency court.
Spotlight reported that Gustavo Caraveo, vice president of Child Advocates of Silicon Valley, said Aguilar was not under investigation and that the organization had no reason to believe children had been exposed to Torres through Aguilar’s advocacy work.
The article did not reference the Lyndale property disclosed on Torres 700 form or that Aguilar appointment to the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council (CAPC).
Agular was reportedly appointed to CAPC in early 2024. The country has no public records related to his appointment. The only evidence of Agular’s involvement is his own LinkedIn account, and the county’s website.
According to the county’s website, Aguilar serves as chair of the council’s Disproportionality Committee, a leadership role within the county body that coordinates child-abuse prevention policy with law enforcement, county departments and nonprofit partners.
The council’s leadership structure also includes Assistant District Attorney James Gibbons-Shapiro, who chairs the council’s Membership Committee while working as a senior prosecutor in District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s office, earning over $486,756 in public pay and benefits.
The overlap placed Aguilar — the man who ultimately received Torres’ share of the Lyndale Avenue property — on a county child-abuse prevention council alongside prosecutors from the same office handling the criminal case against Torres.
Meanwhile, Aguilar’s LinkedIn profile shows that he has since moved into a new role as a clinical therapist with HealthRIGHT 360, a nonprofit behavioral-health organization in San Francisco providing mental-health and substance-use treatment services across California.
Child Sex Abuse Victim Restitution Order
By early 2026, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Cynthia A. Sevely issued a detailed written ruling explaining how the law requires courts to compensate victims of felony sexual abuse. Her decision began by explaining the statutory framework in plain terms: under California Penal Code §1202.4, victims must receive full restitution for every economic loss, and in cases involving sexual abuse the law also allows courts to compensate victims for non-economic harm such as psychological injury, emotional distress and trauma-based damage to a person’s life trajectory.
The judge emphasized that the law does not require a precise mathematical formula.
Instead, courts must use a reasonable, evidence-based method to approximate the real harm caused by the crime, recognizing that long-term psychological injury often cannot be measured with the precision of a medical bill or lost paycheck.
“The statute does not impose a fixed valuation method,” the court wrote, explaining that judges may use frameworks similar to civil “pain and suffering” damages when calculating the lasting impact of sexual abuse.
The ruling then laid out the human consequences of child sex abuse.
The court found that the victim suffered long-standing psychological injury that persisted into adulthood, including the development of an eating disorder, chronic hygiene dysfunction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction and repeated periods of homelessness. The order also cited an impaired ability to maintain stability in early adulthood and continuing emotional scars that remained even after the victim later established a functional adult life.
“The harm was not limited to the period of abuse,” Judge Sevely wrote. “Instead, it created a life-course trauma pattern, interfering with emotional regulation, self-worth, and basic functioning over decades.”
The court also noted a striking detail about Torres’ life during that period.
The court found that Torres never used that power to help the victim he had abused, a failure that reasonably contributed to the prolonged duration of psychological harm.
Judge Sevely determined that the abuse caused continuous psychological harm affecting daily functioning for approximately 26 years, and that $30,000 per year represented a reasonable measure of the victim’s non-economic losses.
The calculation produced a restitution award of $780,000.
The ruling made clear that the award was not intended as punishment for Torres but as a rational attempt to compensate the victim for decades of harm caused by the abuse.
For the victim, the order represented one of the few tangible acknowledgments the justice system can provide for trauma that reshapes a life.
District Attorney Gives Child Sex Abuse Victim for Speaking Up, But Fails to Stop the Steal
After the restitution order was issued, and the Lyndale property had been transferred to Aguilar, District Attorney Jeff Rosen decorated Adrian with his office’s Karyn Sinunu Towery Courage Award. That same day Rosen posted the award ceremony on his political campaign’s social media accounts, using the victim’s full name and image in a manner that appeared political and self-serving.
The moment created a striking contradiction.
As Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen publicly honored the victim, the Lyndale Avenue property that could have helped satisfy the restitution order had already been transferred out of Torres’ name to Nicholas Aguilar as a “gift.”
Rosen’s office took no action to stop the steal even after the Vanguard brought it to the district attorney’s attention. Meanwhile, Aguilar remains in a position of influence on the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council.
James McManis, a prominent San Jose attorney and former prosecutor with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office who has represented high-profile crime victims in the county, reviewed the documents obtained by the Vanguard’s investigative reporting team and said the handling of the Torres case raises serious questions about victim restitution protection.
“In the 16 years Jeff Rosen has been Santa Clara County district attorney, he seems to have lost sight of crime victims,” McManis said. “Too often they are highlighted only when it serves a political purpose.”
McManis has previously criticized Rosen for failing to fully comply with California’s Crime Victims’ Rights and Marsy’s Law, “failures that not only harm victims but can also expose taxpayers to unnecessary legal costs.”
McManis, who represented victims in the Sunnyvale ESL shooting involving Richard Farley — said the Torres case reflects a broader pattern.
According to McManis, the property transfer that occurred while Torres’ criminal case was pending may now force the victim to pursue additional legal action.
“Now the victim — and potentially the public — may face significant legal costs trying to claw those assets back after Rosen’s office allowed the property to be transferred,” he said.
“Jeff Rosen repeatedly claims to stand with crime victims, and he has been given tremendous resources to do that job,” McManis said. “But time and again we see decisions that fail victims, waste taxpayer resources, and undermine the work of police officers who are trying to protect the public.”
The contradiction carries weight in East San Jose, a working-class community where many residents live far from the economic prosperity associated with Silicon Valley despite being only minutes from the technology campuses and venture capital firms that generate billions of dollars each year.
To support this series, readers can make an unrestricted tax-deductible donation to the Vanguard. Part Two of the Secrets of a Child Molester at City Hall investigates the Lyndale Avenue property and an 11-year-old autistic boy Torres once claimed was his son.
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Breaking News Everyday Injustice
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Crime Victims East San Jose James McManis Jeff Rosen Judge Cynthia A. Sevely Nelson McElmurry Omar Torres Prosecutorial Accountability Santa Clara County District Attorney victim restitution
