Ramon Montoya also known as Ramon Montanya was arrested today for assaulting a 13 year old boy two years ago. Montoya was employed as a juvenile correctional officer with the Bexar County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) at the time. According to media reports, Montoya was caught on camera placing the boy's arm behind his back, lifting his arm up, hyperextending his arm, and breaking his shoulder.
The BCSO Public Integrity Unit and the juvenile detention center conducted two separate investigation both of which resulted in cases being filed with the District Attorney's Office on April 7, 2021. He is charged with one first degree felony and a class a misdemeanor. The felony is injury to a child with serious bodily injury with intent and knowledge. The misdemeanor is assault resulting in bodily injury.
We would like to know what took the BCSO so long. They had the guy caught on camera breaking a child's shoulder, but it took them until just one day shy of the two year anniversary to arrest him. We understand that it takes time for law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations and that internal investigations are given far lower priority than others, but there is no excuse for dragging out a case like this when it involves a child and is caught on camera. The Texas tort statute of limitations for personal injury claims is two years (https://texaslawhelp.org/article/statutes-limitation-civil-lawsuits). We think that is why the county took so long. By waiting until the day before the two year anniversary they may have been able to stack the deck by adding a misdemeanor charge the day before the statute of limitations on misdemeanors expired without giving the victim time to sue the county based on the charges.
There still might be hope for a civil remedy in this case however. Under Texas law there are exceptions to the two year statute of limitations (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-the-personal-injury-statute-of-limitations-in-texas.html). Those exceptions include the disability of being a minor child. If a person is under the age of 18 the statute of limitations usually does not start running until their 18the birthday. We hope that the victim and his parents are aware of this fact and sue the county as well as Montoya. This case should fund his college fund.
This case is a major trigger for this author. I had my arm broken by a correctional officer in Portland, Oregon 4 years ago. In my case there were no cameras recording the incident, so the officer was able to accuse me of "fighting ferociously" and the government sided with him saying that it was my fault. I ended up being convicted of assault and have been unable to find legal counsel willing to represent me despite my defense team being able to obtain an expert witness whose forensic analysis proved I was telling the truth. I wouldn't have pled to the assault charge had it not been based on conduct that took place several minutes before my arm was broken in retaliation. No lawyer wants to represent someone convicted of assault in a lawsuit against the named victim in the case based on just forensic evidence. One told me that he though I wouldn't get any money even if a jury believed me due to how I treated the officer earlier. Had there just been a camera recording the incident I would hope that would have made the difference, he would have been arrested, and a lawyer would have taken my case.
The news media is reporting that this man's name is Ramon Montoya, but the Bexar County Jail lists his name as Ramon M. Montanya (see PDF above map). We did a background search for men named Ramon Montanya in Texas and the only result that popped up was for a 31 year old El Paso resident listed under a similar name.
Update: We found a conflicting news story listing him as Ramon Montanya (https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/06/29/former-juvenile-detention-officer-accused-of-excessive-use-of-force-on-13-year-old-boy-bsco-says/) with no mention of the name Montoya. Our original source was a KENS 5 article which you can find under the "more info" link above the map on this page. That article listed him as Montoya. We suspect the first source of being incorrect due to both the BCSO and a different media outlet listing him as Montanya. We know that citing our sources in that way can be a little inconvenient for users, but it is necessary because this site features a lot of user generated content and we need to do it that way to prevent link spam.