WACO, Texas (KWTX) – A former West woman testified Tuesday that Kenneth Galvez sexually abused her for at least six years beginning when she was about 7 years old.
Galvez, 46, is on trial in Waco’s 474th State District Court on a continuous sexual assault of a young child charge and four counts of indecency with a child by contact.
The woman, now 23 with a husband and an 8-month-old child, told jurors she did not tell anyone for years about the long-term sexual abuse by Galvez and planned to take her secret “to the grave.”
That changed in 2020 when she saw a therapist to discuss other issues in her life and to help chart her future, which she thought at the time would include joining the Air Force.
The therapist, Rene Boldt, who also testified Tuesday, asked her during their preliminary discussions if she had been the victim of physical or sexual abuse, and she revealed that Galvez, a family member, had been touching her improperly for years.
Kenneth Galvez(Photo Credit: Tommy Witherspoon for KWTX)
The indictment against Galvez, who worked at the time as a supervisor at a home improvement and agriculture supply company, alleges he abused the girl from October 2007 to August 2016.
The woman said after she revealed the abuse to the therapist, she also told her mother.
She said Galvez would come into her room at their home on Wiggins Road in West when her mother and siblings were gone and touch her improperly – often once a week and sometimes a couple of times a month.
She said she never told anyone because she was embarrassed and scared of what might happen to her family in the aftermath. She said Galvez told her repeatedly not to tell anyone. She testified he asked her once when she was a young girl while fondling her chest, “Will you still let me touch you like this when you grow boobs?”
“I understood that it was making me uncomfortable and it was not going on in every household,” she told prosecutor Ryan Bownds. “I was grossed out and I understood it shouldn’t be happening.”
Bownds and James Murphy are Williamson County assistant district attorneys who took over the case after McLennan County District Attorney Josh Tetens recused his office because Tetens once represented Galvez in the case when Tetens was in private practice.
The woman told jurors that she went along with the abuse to appease Galvez and to not upset family dynamics. She said Galvez often gave her his phone to play puzzle games while he abused her.
“It was a really great distraction,” she said.
She said she stuck by her accusations all these years because she feared other family members might suffer the same fate.
“I am terrified that this all is going to be swept under the rug,” she said. “I lived my whole life with this being swept under the rug… I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”
In other prosecution testimony Tuesday, Heydi McKinney, a forensic interviewer at the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children, testified that she interviewed the woman in 2020 and said she repeated the accusations against Galvez at that time.
In opening statements, defense attorney Darren Obenoskey told the jury that no other family members in the household suspected any wrongdoing by Galvez, adding that the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office conducted “no real investigation” into the allegations.
If convicted on the continuous count, Galvez faces a minimum of 25 years in prison with no possibility of parole up to life in prison with no parole.
Prosecution testimony resumes Wednesday morning.
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