A former South Florida basketball coach who faced child molestation charges in 2014 has once again been taken into custody after, police said, one more alleged victim came forward.
Thirty-five-year-old Javier Cuenca was arrested on Friday. He faces one count of lewd and lascivious molestation on a child between 12 and 16 years old.
According to Cuenca’s arrest report, an 18-year-old man came forward and accused the defendant of inappropriately touching him back in 2010, when he was 12 years old. The alleged victim told police that Cuenca became his mentor when he was a math teacher and basketball coach at Hialeah Gardens High School. The former student, then a seventh-grader, said Cuenca offered to help him develop his skills to help achieve his goal of becoming a college basketball player.
The alleged victim said Cuenca would call and text him advising to “stay away from girls, so that he could fully concentrate on basketball.” The teen said his former coach then offered to give him sports enhancement drugs, but before giving them to him, Cuenca “would have to check his genitals to see if he was ready to take the drugs.”
The alleged victim said Cuenca would pick him up from his house and take him to the gym, where, he said, the suspect asked to check his genitals.
The allegations echo those brought forth by at least seven other former students in the fall of 2014. Investigators said the alleged abuse in those cases happened a few years ago, after Cuenca transferred from La Salle to Hialeah Gardens High.
At the time of Cuenca’s November 2014 arrest, a relative of one of the alleged victims told 7News, “Some of these kids are in a little cave, hiding from letting out really the rest of the truth. I still think that, within time, they’re going to come out with more information to help the police [uncover] how deep this sick guy went in touching these boys, molesting them.”
As of Friday, Cuenca remained behind bars at the Metro West Detention Center in Miami.
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