An Ector County grand jury indicted Guerdwich Montimere, a 22-year-old man accused of posing as a high school student and basketball star in West Texas, on five felony counts on Monday.
The grand jury returned two indictments against Montimere. The first contained two counts of sexual assault of a child.
Montimere was arrested on May 14 after a 16-year-old girl in Odessa told police and school district officials she had sex with him at a home in August when she thought he was 15-year-old Jerry Joseph.
The second indictment contained two counts of tampering with governmental records and one count of fraudulent use of identifying information.
Indicted for those same offenses was former teammate Jabari Caldwell as a party.
Officials said Montimere enrolled at a junior high school and later at Permian High School last year with a fake birth certificate from Haiti. The Odessa American reported in May that Montimere was enrolled at Permian by Caldwell, who was a teammate of Montimere's at Dillard High School in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. According to the newspaper, Caldwell signed an affidavit that "Jerry Joseph" was his half-brother. Suspicions were raised after coaches at an amateur basketball tournament said they recognized Joseph as Montimere, a 2007 graduate of Dillard and a naturalized U.S. citizen from Haiti.
Permian High School made the state basketball playoffs with Montimere helping lead the way as a sophomore star. Questions arose after the season, and Montimere was initially cleared by immigration authorities and allowed to return to the school.
Montimer was named the District 2-5A Newcomer of the Year. That honor was stripped in recent weeks, and the Panthers forfeited their 16 wins.
1 comment:
That's what the 16 year old girl said...
Post a Comment