20 Years Probation For Sexual Assault On a Child

A Jeffco father and attorney answered our call to help fill the courtroom for the Chloe Castro sentencing (Jeffco Schools social worker who admitted to sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust—her own IEP special needs student). This is what he shared on social media when he returned home.

I was in the Jefferson County Courthouse earlier this afternoon, and the world doesn’t make sense anymore. I watched a school social worker admit to sexual assault of a student and get sentenced to probation with zero prison time.

I don’t spend time in court. I’m a transaction guy. People hear “lawyer” and assume I live in a courtroom, but that’s not my world. Maybe in another life I would have been good at it, but not this one. I went today for one reason, to support a local family.

For most of the hearing, I was sitting behind a combat veteran, and the whole time I kept thinking he looked like the guy who didn’t belong there. He was tense in a way you can’t fake, the kind of tension you see when everything is on the line and you’re waiting for someone else to decide how your life is about to change. When he finally had a chance to speak, his voice was strong, but it caught in the parts that mattered most. If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume he was the one facing prison.

He wasn’t. He was the father.

His son is a special needs middle school student who had been violated by someone inside the school system. The defendant was the social worker assigned to that kid, the person responsible for his IEP, someone in a position of direct authority and trust. And there was no real dispute about what happened.

The conduct had been admitted, stipulated to, and pled out as Sexual Assault on a Child by One in a Position of Trust, Victim Less Than 15, under C.R.S. 18-3-405.3(1),(2)(a), a Class 3 felony. In open court, across the board, people used the same language, including grooming and sexual conduct that developed over time.

The judge himself described the harm as irreparable, so there wasn’t any confusion about the seriousness of it.

After the victim statements, I watched one of the most effective courtroom presentations I’ve ever seen. It was controlled, deliberate, and persuasive in a way that stands out, even if you don’t spend your life in courtrooms. It walked through the defendant’s background, the therapy she had gone through since being caught, and why she supposedly didn’t present a meaningful risk going forward. It was the kind of argument that, if you walked in halfway through, you’d assume you were listening to defense counsel doing their job at a very high level.

You weren’t. That argument came from Tyra Forbes, the Chief Deputy District Attorney for Jefferson County, the person tasked with handling cases involving vulnerable victims, the one who is supposed to stand in that room and protect that 14-year-old boy.

Instead, she stood up and built the strongest case in the room for the 29-year-old who admitted to abusing that position of trust.

Judge Diego Hunt then went through the statutory factors out loud, talking about the seriousness of the harm, the risk to others, and whether imposing probation would depreciate the severity of the conduct or undermine respect for the law. He acknowledged those factors, and he even noted that he has two children in this same school district, saying that cases like this are particularly important to him.

And then he imposed probation and house arrest.

There had been some time served leading up to sentencing, but that doesn’t change what happened in that room.

After the hearing, the father wasn’t confused. He understood this might be the outcome. What he couldn’t understand was why the prosecutor stood up and made the case for it. He called it out directly, asking why she would argue for no prison time, why remorse and therapy were being used to justify that result for someone who did this to his son.

And instead of engaging, she shut it down and called deputies over.

That’s what hit.

Not just the sentence, but hearing the state make that argument and then watching a father get that response when he asked why.

People will give you explanations. They’ll talk about mitigation, discretion, therapy, and all the things that get said in rooms like that. But at some point, this gets simpler than all of it.

Are we okay living in a world where a school employee can have sexual relations with a child in that school and not be sentenced to years in prison?