By Susana Jurado
FRESNO, CA – Charged with domestic abuse, felony false imprisonment, felony preventing his partner from reporting a crime, criminal contempt, violating a protective order, cruelty to a child, and possession of a controlled substance, Jordan Hayden was bound over for trial after his preliminary hearing here in Fresno County Superior Court Wednesday.
According to court records, in the early morning hours of January 14 of this year, law enforcement received a domestic disturbance call occurring at the Economy Inn in the city of Fresno. In the dispatch call, a woman can be heard telling authorities that the defendant Hayden, her boyfriend, had thrown her out of her motel room while locking himself in the motel room with their child.
As officers arrived, the alleged victim asked to get back into the room as she was giving the first officer on scene her statement. Officers tried knocking on the door but no one was answering, and so they set up a perimeter around the motel room to make sure Hayden did not escape.
After about 15 minutes of waiting by law enforcement, the defendant suddenly opened the door and walked out with the child in front of him. The victim told officers that he would most likely fight back—two officers standing by the door immediately grabbed and took him into custody.
When the victim saw him, she started to cry and asked that her child be brought over.
The victim told police that prior to this assault, Hayden had just come to the motel from being out with his friends using methamphetamine. She told police that he offered to give her a pedicure and when he saw her feet, he 
accused her of being a fake, telling her that those feet did not belong to her.
The victim recounted her story to the officers, saying she tried to reason with him, claiming she really was his girlfriend. However, that just made him angrier until he punched her in the face. She tried one more time to talk to him but he struck her again, making her fall from the chair she was sitting on.
At trial, it got interesting.
Once the alleged victim was sworn in and seated, Deputy DA Kendall Reynolds asked the victim, “Do you know a Jordan Hayden?”
The victim refused to respond to the question and rather instead repeatedly stated, “I’m declining to respond pursuant to Code of Civil Procedure (section) 1219.
Fresno Superior Court Judge Glenda Allen Hill spoke up to advise the victim to testify, as it is a requirement from the court. Judge Allen Hill further informed her, “If you are not to testify, then the court will find you in contempt. Do you understand that?”
She continued to recite her right to remain silent, to which the judge responded saying, “The court is prepared to find you in contempt. I’m going to appoint counsel to represent you unless you have your own attorney.” Judge Allen Hill set a court date on the matter of contempt for the victim on August 6, at 1:30 p.m. and excused her.
Deputy DA Reynolds next called Police Officer Arthur DeLeon, who was dispatched to the crime scene. He said he was “flagged down by a female. She was holding a towel to her head and she had blood on the towel. There was blood coming from her lip, her nose, and the side of her face. She had told me that she was the one that called the police.
“I did conduct a search for Mr. Hayden before we put him into the vehicle. I remember in his small left shorts pocket, I located a small baggie containing a white crystal like substance which, based on my experience and training, I could identify as methamphetamine,” said the officer.
The victim stated to Officer DeLeon that she had been with the defendant since high school. There had been at least three prior occasions of domestic abuse and Hayden had just been recently released from jail on one of the charges.
“Mr. Hayden had become violent on prior occasions with her and the domestic history stemmed largely from the use of crystal methamphetamine,” the officer said, adding that he was told, “The victim fell off the chair that she was sitting on and fell to the ground. Once on the ground she was able to pick herself up a little bit and immediately grab her cell phone to call the police. She knew she couldn’t handle the situation any further.
“She told me he jumped on her and immediately started struggling with her, hitting, kicking, pushing, slapping, and grabbing her hair pulling it back to be able to grab the phone and pull it away from her,” Officer DeLeon said. “He was able to grab the phone away from her and she was able to break free.”
DeLeon added that, once free, “She jumped to the opposite side of the bed to get the motel room phone, an older style phone with a wire connected to the wall. He went over to her as she was getting ready to dial the police and grabbed the phone from her face, pulling it away, and broke the wire now rendering the phone unusable.”
During the altercation, the child sleeping on the bed woke up and started to cry. The victim told police she went to grab her child to leave, but Hayden wouldn’t let her, telling the child she “wasn’t her mother, she was a fake, and not to go with her,” and the defendant grabbed the victim and started pulling her and dragging her to the front door.
“The victim told me that she continued to struggle with him because she didn’t want to leave the room. She was in fear for her child and she was in fear for herself. Mr. Hayden was pulling her, dragging her, grabbed her by the hair and at one point pulled a rather large clump of hair out of her hair. “
The victim admitted to law enforcement that she was kicking him and hitting him because she was going to do whatever it took to reach her child and get free. The victim later told police that when Hayden overpowered her and threw her out of the room, she managed to get ahold of his cell phone and called the police right after he locked the door behind him.
The public defender later asked DeLeon if the defendant was compliant with arrest, and the officer admitted “he did not fight us.”
When asked about the incident of the pedicure in greater detail by the public defender, DeLeon responded, “He didn’t think those feet belonged to her,” adding, “The part where he believed that her feet didn’t belong to her, yes, she thought that was odd, the part where he becomes violent, no, she didn’t think that was odd.
“She told me he becomes violent when he uses crystal methamphetamine,” testified the officer.
The public defender questioned him further, asking, “Did she describe whether she struck the defendant in the groin during or immediately after the pedicure?”
The officer said, “The pedicure never occurred, when they were struggling for the phone and when he attempted to throw her out of the room, on both occasions she was physically fighting with him.”
DeLeon said, “I did see some marks to his knees, something to his arm but it wasn’t bleeding, it looked like maybe it was some redness and maybe some scratches.”
Deputy DA Reynolds filed a motion that held Hayden to answer for all 6 counts based on the testimony given by Officer DeLeon in Dept 11 at Fresno Superior Court.
The public defender asked the court to not hold Hayden to answer for the felony counts by reducing those charges to misdemeanors, noting that the false imprisonment charge should be tossed because “[t]he evidence suggests that while there was an alleged assault that took place between Mr. Hayden and the confidential witness, all evidence seems to suggest that after the initial assault, Mr. Hayden attempted to remove the confidential witness from the room and I’ll submit to that argument.”
Deputy DA Reynolds objected: “He jumped on top of her, holding her against her will with violence, even attempting to pull her out of the room, again holding her against her will requires at least the obstruction of movement throughout the room freely. It also requires violence which he also did based on the testimony of the officer, so I think there are multiple areas throughout this continual assault that violence was used to hold the victim against her will, however slight in each instance.”
Judge Allen Hill ruled that there was sufficient cause to believe that Hayden committed all six crimes and was guilty. The motion that the felony charges be dropped to misdemeanors was formally denied. She ordered that he remain in custody with the same bail amount.
The judge set the matter over for arraignment on the information on Thursday, August 13, at 8:30 a.m.
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