Was there ever any question that the story of the year would be former Imperial Irrigation District Director Anthony Sanchez’s saga?
Not really.
Sanchez being caught on video allegedly whipping his stepson with a belt as they played a game of catch in the backyard of their Heber home June 6 took on a life of its own.
For several days in June, when the story broke, it briefly became a national headline.
It grabbed attention on the 24-hour cable news networks, “Inside Edition” and the network morning talk shows.
As a result, several people had their moment in the national spotlight, including Oscar Lopez of Heber, who videotaped the incident from his second-story window before putting down the camera and yelling for Sanchez to stop.
There was Sanchez’s father-in-law and the grandfather of the boy Sanchez was alleged to have beaten, who went on a morning talk show to defend his son-in-law.
Then Sanchez’s attorney, Ryan Childers of El Centro, also took to the a.m. airwaves to plead Sanchez’s case.
Perhaps the biggest star of all was the video itself, a grainy recording of Sanchez and his stepson that went viral within hours of its posting on Facebook, spreading on the Internet like wildfire and used on newscasts across the country. The viral nature of the video clip almost assured Sanchez would not go unpunished, a fact that Lopez has confirmed during interviews.
Because of the circus atmosphere surrounding the case in the early days, Sanchez’s stepson was seemingly all but forgotten. The innocent victim in the incident soon after left the Valley with his mother and Sanchez himself to the mother’s home state of Alabama, where they remain today.
Meanwhile, repercussions of the case went in an additional direction when Sanchez resigned from the Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors on June 8.
That was a significant development in that Sanchez often made up the third vote along a board majority made up of former directors John Pierre Menvielle and Stella Mendoza, who both have since been voted out of office.
With two years left on his seat, a special election was held in November and former Imperial Valley College Trustee Norma Sierra Galindo, who narrowly lost out to Sanchez in a re-election bid two years earlier, beat out a field of four others, including front runner Wally Leimgruber.
Resolution in the criminal case against Sanchez remains, with a pretrial conference set for sometime this month after a similar court appearance was cancelled in early December.
Initially the Imperial County District Attorney’s Office charged Sanchez with two felony counts — child abuse and corporal injury to a child. However, the judge in the case dropped the felony child abuse count. A misdemeanor child abuse count was later added by the DA.
Throughout Sanchez has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty either in person or through his attorney.
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