Foreign exchange student Marta San Jose, ‘brainwashed’ by US host into helping molest her underage sister, won’t be charged
Bizarre saga ends for Spanish student, who secretly married abusive host Dale Leary and then helped lure her underage sister to Florida where she was molested
Prosecutors on Thursday dropped the case against a Spanish foreign-exchange student they believe helped her former host in Florida sexually abuse her own underage sister.
The decision, nearly one year after Miami-Dade police arrested Marta San Jose and student sponsor Dale Leary on charges of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child, was made because the younger sister declined to return to the United States to testify against her sibling.
The girls’ mother felt her younger daughter “had already suffered enough” and she didn’t want to see her “subjected to the criminal justice system,” according to a final memo by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.
Her defence lawyer had long insisted that Leary “brainwashed her and manipulated her.”
The conclusion of the criminal case caps a bizarre saga that made headlines from Miami to Europe, shattered the San Jose family and renewed scrutiny on the oversight of student-exchange programmes that match students with American families.
Prosecutors cannot go after Leary himself – he killed himself days after being bailed out of jail last summer. San Jose was placed in the Leary household by Chicago-based CCI Greenheart, despite his felony conviction for sexually attacking a woman during a home-invasion robbery in 1985.