\A Yonkers man who took cell phone videos of a pre-teen girl performing oral sex on him has been convicted of sexually abusing the girl multiple times over four years.
Rolando Ruiz, 40, faces up to life in prison after the jury on Friday, Oct. 9, took less than 90 minutes to convict him of predatory sexual abuse of a child and all other charges after a weeklong trial in Westchester County Court.
Assistant District Attorney Owein Levin called the videos "disgusting, repugnant" in his summation Friday morning and apologized to jurors that they had to watch something they would never be able to unsee.
"Just watching them makes you lose a piece of humanity and he had them on his phone," the prosecutor said.
But he reminded them of the girl's own testimony
Wednesday in which she made clear that the two videos represented only a fraction of the sexual abuse she endured from Ruiz.
Ruiz, a father of 12 who was a maintenance worker at a Yonkers church, was arrested April 6, 2025, a day after police were contacted by a person who had seen the sexually explicit videos on his cell phone. The videos had been taken in March and December 2024.
Ruiz denied any abuse but did concede to Yonkers detectives Dawn Lebzelter and Kujtim Rugova that he had taken one of the videos, claiming it was proof he had not forced the girl into sexual activity but that she had wanted it from him.
She was either 10 or 11 at the time and could not have legally consented to sexual activity.
The defense called no witnesses. In a summation that lasted just 15 minutes Friday Ruiz's lawyer Joanna Karlitz conceded that the videos proved the girl had been abused but not that her client, whose face could not be seen, was the perpetrator.
She faulted the Yonkers police investigation, saying they relied entirely on a person with an axe to grind against Ruiz who brought them the video and told them what had happened. She said there was reasonable doubt in the fact that others appeared to have had access to Ruiz's phone and more items should have been tested for DNA that might have identified who had abused the girl.
Assistant District Attorney Owein Levin countered that the identity of the man in the videos was clear from the distinctive tattoo on his forearm that matched the one Ruiz had during the interrogation and from the voice that spoke in vulgar terms on one of the videos.
He also highlighted Ruiz's reaction when the detectives first suggested the interview was about sex with an underage child. The prosecutor said that if an innocent person was asked if they had recorded themself having sex with an 11-year-old "there's only one answer and it better be an unequivocal 'No'."
"An innocent man would be shocked to hear such an accusation. Outraged," Levin said.
The interview had occurred some ten hours after Ruiz was taken into custody, during which time he had not been told what he was being accused of.
Once the investigators brought up the phone videos, Rugova told Ruiz he must have figured out by then what trouble he was facing.
'Yes sir'", Ruiz answered.
"That's another way of saying 'You got me'," Levin told jurors.
Much of the interview video showed Ruiz sitting alone in the room at Yonkers police headquarters after he had stopped the detectives' questioning by asking for a lawyer. Talking to himself, he repeatedly denied any abuse and blamed the person who had reported him, saying they were lying about him to ruin his life.
The explicit videos were played for jurors Wednesday but not on the screens the gallery could see. Court staff said some jurors appeared to be crying while watching the videos.
Karlitz urged jurors not to be swayed by such emotion when they deliberated.
In addition to the top charge, Ruiz was convicted of use of a child in a sexual performance and possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child.
He was returned to the county jail to await sentencing, which Westchester Judge Robert Prisco scheduled for Nov. 24.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Yonkers man who took videos of sexual activity with girl convicted
