Jury Acquits Former Mormon Leader Accused of Sex Assault

By Marissa Lang
The Salt Lake Tribune
May 23, 2014

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57977561-78/guzman-montreux-biting-family.html.csp

For two years, Efrey Guzman stood firm in the face of lurid and bizarre accusations.

When prosecutors said the former LDS branch president assaulted a teen girl in her Millcreek home, he denied it. When they said he attacked a mother, he insisted he had not. When they said he bit the penis of a young man so severely that the man required reparative surgery, he swore his innocence.

On Friday, Guzman left the courthouse a free man.

An eight-person jury acquitted the 48-year-old man of all charges: aggravated sexual assault and aggravated burglary, both first-degree felonies, and sex abuse of a child and forcible sexual abuse, second-degree felonies.

"He’s a good man, a church man, and he was accused of a very awful, awful crime of which he was innocent," said Guzman’s defense attorney Bel-Ami De Montreux. "He simply was not there. He has an alibi."

In the course of Guzman’s five-day trial, prosecutors accused the man of groping a 13-year-old girl in May 2012, then returning for her three months later, crazed with desire.

They said he burst through the front door, shouting for the 13-year-old girl, pushed the mother to the floor, ripped her shirt, grabbed her breast and choked her as he attempted to undo his pants.

"He was trying to rape me," the mother testified at a preliminary hearing last year. "I kept trying to get him off, and I was screaming for my son."

But, de Montreux said, that’s not what happened.

When pressed on who attacked the girl in May, the family could only recall that it was a man named Frank. A family friend.