DNA ties man accused in other cases to girl’s assault in Miami Beach: cops
A man was arrested on Tuesday after being accused of molesting a girl in a portable bathroom nearly 11 years ago, marking his fourth arrest this year for alleged sexual abuse against children in Miami Beach from 2010-2017, police said.
The accusations against Freddy Zelaya, 46, began after a man came forward to report he had been abused by Zelaya as a child, according to a series of arrest affidavits by the Miami Beach Police Department.
Zelaya started to abuse him when he was around 10 years old, lasting from 2010-2017, the affidavit said. He is accused of raping the boy and frequently forcing him to watch child pornography.
On Jan. 15, Miami Beach police arrested Zelaya. He denied the allegations.
Then, a woman and a girl went to police about two weeks later, the affidavits said. Both had been aware their attacker was arrested and wanted to report their abuse, too.
The woman told investigators he was an “opportunistic attacker” who started regularly molesting her starting when she was 7 years old in 2014, the affidavit said. She hadn’t previously reported these encounters to her parents “out of shame and fear.”
When police interviewed the girl, she described being molested in 2014 during a Christmastime visit to his home, the affidavit said. She was “merely five years old.”
During the course of the investigation, the male victim told police that Zelaya had confided in him that he had once taken a girl to a portable restroom in 2015 to sexually abuse her, the affidavit said.
There was an attack during which a father was walking with his four children near North Shore Open Space Park when he noticed one of them was missing, the Miami Herald reported on Oct. 13, 2015.
He went looking for his daughter and saw a man walking out of the bushes holding her hand, according to the Herald archives. The girl told police at the time the man held a knife to her and led her to a portable toilet at a construction site between the park and Altos Del Mar, a gated community.
The girl was 7 years old, according to a 2015 report by WTVJ-NBC 6.
After the male victim accused Zelaya of taking part in an incident whose details matched the construction-site assault, investigators drafted a warrant for his DNA, the affidavit said.
Zelaya adamantly told police he didn’t sexually abuse the girl and offered a sample of his DNA, the affidavit said. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office laboratory compared his sample with a sample from the girl taken over a decade ago, and they matched.
This week, he was arrested for the fourth time this year in Miami-Dade on one count of molestation of a child younger than 12 involving a defendant age 18 or older and one count of kidnapping a child under 13 to commit a lewd and lascivious act, court records show. He also faces eight other charges stemming from the alleged sexual abuse of the other victims.
Zelaya was being held without bond Wednesday at the Metro West Detention Center, jail records show. General Counsel Guy Robinson, of the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, said “we have no comment at this time.”
