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A man incarcerated in Pitkin County Jail on felony charges from an allegedly violent domestic incident in July 2023 has since been charged with five counts of sexual assault, creating a recipe for an unfair trial, a public defender argued in a recently filed motion.
Dagoberto Romero-Moreno, 51, has been in Pitkin County Jail since authorities arrested him in New Mexico on July 28, 2023, one day after he was in Aspen and allegedly attacked his wife with a knife, bound her at the wrists and ankles with duct tape and zip ties, kidnapped one of their children and fled the area in a stolen vehicle.
He has been in jail on a cash-only bond of $250,000 and has yet to enter a plea to the original charges prosecutors filed against him in October 2023 — felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon, assault causing disfigurement and kidnapping, and misdemeanor child abuse. Those charges all relate to the alleged July 2023 incident.
Ten scheduled arraignment hearings have been postponed and five preliminary hearings have been either postponed or vacated since the arrest, according to court records.
And in March 2024, the prosecution added four counts of sexual assault against Romero-Moreno stemming from four different dates in 2023 — June 2, June 17, July 6 and July 27, the date Romero-Moreno committed the alleged offenses in the original information. In September, a fifth count of sexual assault was filed against Romero-Moreno over an alleged incident from May 21, 2023.
Romero-Moreno’s wife was the victim in all five sexual assaults, according to prosecutors. The defense motion asks to sever four of the five sexual counts from the original case; it does not ask for the July 27 sexual assault charge to be severed.
“Specifically, the broad allegations included in the amended information accuse Mr. Romero-Moreno of having sexual contact with his wife while she was asleep,” says the defense motion to sever the counts.
The motion also argues the sex crimes have “evidence (that) does not overlap at all. The modus operandi is entirely different and the defense presented necessarily will be different. These charges should never have been permitted to be filed in the same case in the first place.”
Romero-Moreno’s most recent court appearance was March 3, when Haynes mentioned the motion to the court. The prosecution has 21 days to respond from the date of the Feb. 28 filing of the motion to sever the counts.
“I don’t think it makes sense to set this for trial with this issue pending,” Haynes said.
Romero-Moreno’s next scheduled arraignment date, the 11th one for such a proceeding, is April 21.
In the incident that led to his arrest, Romero-Moreno is accused of binding his wife’s ankles and wrists with duct tape and zip ties and placing a man-made collar around her neck. She escaped from him to a public bus that picked her up at the Buttermilk Ski Area at the intersection of Highway 82 and Harmony Road, according to an Aspen police arrest affidavit.
The affidavit said that Romero-Moreno tried to cut off the Roaring Fork Transportation bus in the Toyota Highlander he was driving and while the child was in the vehicle. He abandoned the vehicle in Snowmass Village, then stole a Chevy Trailblazer and drove it to New Mexico with one of their children he kidnapped, authorities alleged.
The wife also suffered razor-blade cuts to her eyelid, allegedly inflicted by Romero-Moreno when they were at their Burlingame Ranch home, the affidavit said.
At an August 2023 bond hearing for Romero-Moreno, prosecutor Benjamin Sollars, who is now the district attorney for the 9th Judicial District of Garfield, Rio Blanco and Pitkin counties, said the defendant attempted to blind his wife with the cuts. As well, he “intentionally stabbed her in the back with some sort of filet knife, sought to roll her up in a blanket and take her to a car but couldn’t carry her, so ultimately had to cut the tape on her so that she could walk, and obviously she then ran to a bus stop and by the grace of God, a bus showed up right at the time; not that the defendant would be outdone when he tried to crash into the bus itself. I don’t say these things gratuitously.”
The motion to sever the counts, written by Deputy State Public Defender Alex Haynes, asks that the sexual-assault charges be severed from the original case against Romero-Moreno. Otherwise, the motion argues, “He will face unfair and irreparable prejudice if the same finder of fact (in a bench or jury trial) simultaneously hears that, on wholly unrelated dates, he had sex with his wife while she was asleep and then hear that he violently assaulted her with razor blades.”
Authorities in Aztec, New Mexico, apprehended him on July 28 on a warrant for his arrest out of Aspen, according to jail records and an Aspen Police Department news release. Authorities also recovered and placed the child in protective custody at the time, according to APD.