By Macy Lu & Julian Navarro
SACRAMENTO – Edward Marin was in Sacramento County Superior Court Thursday because he is charged with 32 counts of sexual assault spanning 10 years against with two underage daughters of a former girlfriend.
The testimony was lurid and detailed. The court ruled Thursday after a preliminary hearing that Marin should stand trial on those charges.
The April complaint filed in the case alleged that Marin performed lewd, sexual acts 32 times, and it began about 11 years ago when the eldest was eight years old.
Detective Allison Cunningham from the Sacramento Police Department’s Child Sex Assault Unit testified that she extensively interviewed both victims and their brother on three separate 
occasions from January to February of this year.
She explained that one victim said, to win her cooperation, he had “obscured her vision by placing a blindfold over her eyes” with “a scarf” and told her he was offering her a “lollipop.”
Cunningham said after that first encounter, Marin would repeat the same style of assault between “once a week” to “once a month,” “[occurring] regularly” and “in a routine” over the course of seven years “in the living room or the kitchen.”
Additionally, Cunningham stated the victim recalls there were numerous times in which “Mr. Marin had sex with [the victim] in her bedroom.”
Cunningham noted that on one occasion the victim claimed Marin gave her “a bottle of what looked to be Kool-Aid and told her to drink it all….she didn’t feel quite right, that she felt a little funny, dizzy, and she had a migraine.”
The last time the defendant violated either of the victims was two weeks prior to the disclosure to the police in the eldest’s senior year in high school in December 2019.
The younger of the victims eventually confided in her friend during her junior year when she was 16 years old. Cunningham reports that her friend then wrote a letter to the school notifying them of these occurrences after she noticed the victim “getting more and more sad, and depressed even.”
When questioned about whether the victims correctly identified the defendant as Marin, Cunningham said Marin showed up at the high school and was “present for some of the taking of the initial report, so I presumed that he had already been ID’ed, and it was obvious to me it was Edward Marin that they were speaking of.”
Judge Ernest W. Sawtelle found sufficient cause, for the purpose of a preliminary hearing, to believe the defendant Marin has performed these 32 sexual assault acts, spanning a period of more than 10 years against two underage girls.
Marin’s arraignment date has been set for Dec. 3, in Sacramento Dept. 61 at 1:35 p.m. His trial will follow that.
Macy is a junior from Orange County, CA studying Communications and English at UC Davis. She loves meeting people, reading books, and writing 
creatively.
Julian Navarro is a senior at Sacramento State majoring in Criminal Justice. He is from Half Moon Bay, California.
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