Texas high school athlete who sodomized 16-year-old boy with carbon dioxide tank during brutal hazing ritual spared jail time
LA VERNIA, TEXAS: Texan high school athlete Robert Olivarez, Jr. has been spared jail time after he pleaded no contest to allegations that he sodomized a 16-year-old boy.
Olivarez allegedly sodomized the other boy with the end of a carbon dioxide tank during a hazing ritual and pleaded no contest to a felony charge of unlawful restraint on Monday, October 21.
He was sentenced to five years of deferred adjudication, which is often inclusive of community service and probation.
Olivarez, who was 17 at the time of the incident, had allegedly sodomized the 16-year-old in bed, using the threaded end of a carbon-dioxide tank to penetrate him. The incident from 2016 was part of an initiation ritual for the La Vernia high school's varsity football team, according to reports.
Accompanied by two other companions at a home, the three of them had reportedly held the victim down before attacking him.
"The victim struggled to stop the assault, but was overpowered by the four suspects and pinned down where he could not move," La Vernia police Sgt. Donald Keil wrote in an affidavit.
Olivarez isn't the first athlete to get away with morbid hazing crimes. Earlier this month, three other Texan high schoolers managed to escape jail time after they too accepted plea agreements.
All three were accused of being part of a 13-member group who allegedly sodomized 10 younger classmates using items like deodorant bottles, flashlights, soda bottles, pipes, and baseball bats.
According to the Daily Beast, the Texas Attorney General’s Office claimed all four accused were minors at the time of the crime and haven't had their names released publicly.
KENS5 reported that all of them received five years of probation ad at least 100 hours of community service, with the judge calling the case a "tragedy of society".
One of the victims' mothers also claimed that these assaults were becoming so common that varsity football team athletes have begun showering at their campus grounds with their underwear on to avoid being attacked.
Back in 2017, two mothers had claimed that blood-stained underwears were so common that their volume had clogged up the pipes in the locker room. As for the 13 accused, many are aged 18 now and have remained free on bail all through the three years since their arrest.
There have been incidents where the accused have encountered the victims and their families at local commercial establishments in and around the area. Many of the victims, including one who was a player on the high school football team, have also left the town.
The particular football player's mother told the Daily Beast: "I'm still angry about the whole thing and I want them to pay for what they did. It was very upsetting to me that everything seemed to disappear and was forgotten."
"There's so much corruption and drama there." When asked about her son, she told the outlet: "He doesn't like to talk about it."
After one child admitted that he was sexually assaulted in a bathroom, the other victims also felt prompted to come forward.
One of those victims' parents had told the outlet: "They hold them down and stick various items up their rectum... including coke bottles, deodorant bottles, steel pipes, baseball bats and broomsticks."
It was only in March 2017 that the parents were informed by the police that their sons may have been assaulted. When one of the mothers had asked the cops what her son had been assaulted with, he told her, "I'd rather not tell you. You don't want to know."
Two of the victims' families have also filed a civil lawsuit against the school district and claimed that the team coaches "turned a blind eye" to the crimes and had even "sanctioned these rituals".
In the suit, one of the victims has claimed he was sexually assaulted when he was just 15 and had been upped from the junior varsity team to the varsity football team.
He said, he was told to "get ready" by senior teammates and moments later, three older students allegedly pinned him down on the ground and penetrated him with a Gatorade bottle through his shorts inside the locker room.
This was after the victim was assaulted and bullied by the same senior teammates countless times throughout 2015 and 2016.