In the criminal trial of a retired NHL player charged with repeated sexual assaults, testimony began again on Friday morning.
After retiring from hockey in 2017, Mike Ribeiro, 43, of Fresno, California, was charged with three counts of sexual assault that are said to have occurred on June 23, 2021.
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office’s Lt. Leo Herrera, the case’s main investigator, began the trial proceedings on Thursday. Herrera cited a small agency with few detectives as the reason for the ten-month lapse between collecting the initial statements, conducting his investigation, and submitting the case to the district attorney’s office for prosecution until April 2022.
Video from Herrera’s interviews with the claimed victims—who went into explicit detail about Ribeiro’s alleged sexual assaults—was displayed.
Herrera was dismissed after video was shown from an interview with Ribeiro’s third alleged victim.
A sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE), who examined the three ladies barely hours after they made their statements at the sheriff’s office, was the next witness called by the state. The nurse gave a thorough explanation of her duties and the protocols for conducting exams for sexual assault. After that, she was asked specific questions about each of the three assessments and given the paper records she had taken, going into further depth to clarify her notes. She claimed that, at the time of the incident, this was just the second occasion in her professional life that she had evaluated three victims simultaneously. To finish all three exams, it took about five hours and one to two boxes of gloves, each containing one hundred gloves.
In all three of the reports, she wrote “no trauma noted” in her physical assessment of each woman’s body.
Testimony will resume Monday morning, starting with the initial cross examination from the defense.
The former NHL player could spend up to 50 years in jail if found guilty on all charges of sexually abusing two women and making attempts to do the same with a third.
