Police say a Milton man charged with sexually assaulting a 12-year-old was partly motivated by the child’s gender identity, making it a hate-motivated crime.
Alfonso Williams, 40, is charged in Chittenden Superior criminal court with aggravated sexual assault of a victim younger than 13. The maximum penalty is 10 years to life in prison.
Williams has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans while awaiting trial.
Authorities accuse Williams of assaulting a 12-year-old child between January and March 2019. Police said he knew the child, a transgender boy.
The child made a complaint with police in December, after disclosing the alleged assault to a social worker and to a relative.
Williams’ actions “appear to have been motivated in part by the victim’s gender identity,” Burlington Police Detective Cpl. Eric Dalla Mura said in a statement of probable cause for the charge, citing the related state law.
Around the time of the alleged assault, the detective said, Williams told the child’s guardian that the child “ain’t no fucking boy.” The guardian reported Williams had been angry and had scared her.
Williams also said it was “not right” that the child wanted to be a boy and should just be a girl, wrote Dalla Mura, who works with the Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations.
Under state law, a person’s gender identity is a protected category, and a crime that is wholly or partly motivated by the victim’s protected category is classified as a hate-motivated crime.
The guardian said Williams also told her that, while imprisoned in Arizona, he’d sexually assaulted an incarcerated man who acted like a woman because transgender people “have to pay for it,” according to the police affidavit.
Dalla Mura said his investigation showed Williams had served time at a facility in Arizona between July 2011 and April 2014 for crimes committed in Vermont. The detective said he found a sexual assault allegation that had been investigated by the Vermont Department of Corrections and Vermont State Police, and the details matched what the child’s guardian described, though it took place in Vermont and not Arizona.
The corrections department’s online records show that Williams had been incarcerated between 2001 and 2019.
When asked about the reported Arizona prison assault, the corrections department said it had not been aware of the allegation until Dalla Mura made a report to the department.
“This is an open investigation. Vermont DOC investigates all reports of sexual abuse,” department spokeperson Rachel Feldman said in an email.
The investigation against Williams that Dalla Mura had found was a different case, alleged to have occurred at Northwest State Correctional in 2015, Feldman said. The complainant in that case was an incarcerated man, and it was referred to state police for investigation, Feldman said. She didn’t say if any charges have been filed.
Williams was arrested in January on the child assault charge. Police said he denied the allegation and contended the child’s guardian had coached the child to make the accusation.
He is scheduled to return to court for a motion hearing on Feb. 15.
