Background
Andrew David Trujillo approached nineteen-year-old M.S. and her mother at a grocery store. M.S. has cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability; she lives with her parents and cannot drive, cook, do laundry, or count money. Trujillo asked to take M.S. out, and her mother gave M.S. permission to provide her phone number. The following day, Trujillo went to M.S.’s house while her father was at work and her mother was asleep. He invited M.S. to go for a drive, and she left without telling her mother. Trujillo drove M.S. to a parking lot near a river where, despite M.S. saying no multiple times, he forced her to perform oral sex and then penetrated her vaginally while choking her.
M.S. later told her mother she had been raped, and police were called. Trujillo was charged with sexual assault on an at-risk person, the lesser included offense of sexual assault, and two habitual criminal sentence enhancers. Before trial, Trujillo challenged M.S.’s competency to testify, citing her intellectual disability and alleged inconsistencies in her statements. The Mesa County District Court held a competency hearing and found M.S. competent. The jury convicted Trujillo on all counts, the court merged the sexual assault convictions, and Trujillo was sentenced to seventy-two years to life. The trial court also designated him a sexually violent predator (SVP) based on its finding that M.S. was a stranger to him at the time of the offense.
Trujillo appealed both the competency ruling and the SVP designation. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction but found the SVP designation legally infirm.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s competency determination, finding no abuse of discretion. Although M.S. could not define abstract terms like “truth” and “lie,” she demonstrated a clear functional understanding of those concepts by correctly identifying true and false statements when presented with concrete examples. The court emphasized that witness inconsistencies and memory gaps go to credibility — a question for the jury — not to competency, which requires only the capacity to observe, recollect, communicate, and understand the oath to tell the truth.
On the SVP designation, the court reversed. Under Colorado law, an offender qualifies as an SVP in part if the offense was committed against a stranger — meaning either the victim or the offender was unknown to the other at the time of the offense. See People v. Hunter, 2013 CO 48. The record showed that Trujillo and M.S. had met the day before the assault, exchanged phone numbers and messages via text and Snapchat, talked by phone, and spent time together in M.S.’s bedroom before she got in his car. The trial court’s “stranger” finding rested on a misreading of Trujillo’s own statement: he described M.S. as “a complete stranger” in reference to when he first met her at the grocery store, not at the time of the assault. Because the parties knew each other at the time of the offense, the stranger criterion was unsupported.
The court declined the Attorney General’s request to affirm the SVP designation on the alternative ground that Trujillo established or promoted the relationship primarily for the purpose of sexual victimization, because the trial court made no findings on that criterion. The case was remanded for the trial court to make specific factual findings on the “established or promoted relationship” prong of the SVP statute, section 18-3-414.5(1)(a)(III), C.R.S. 2025.
Key Takeaways
- A witness with an intellectual disability may be competent to testify if she demonstrates a functional — rather than abstract — understanding of truth and the obligation to tell it; memory gaps and prior inconsistent statements affect credibility, not competency.
- For SVP designation under Colorado’s stranger criterion, the relevant moment is the time of the offense, not the initial meeting; brief prior contact, phone exchanges, and in-person interaction can preclude a stranger finding even when the relationship was very short-lived.
- Appellate courts will not affirm an SVP designation on an alternative statutory ground (e.g., the “established or promoted relationship” criterion) when the trial court never made findings on that ground; remand for specific factual findings is required.
- Trial courts must make specific findings of fact supporting each element of an SVP designation; conclusory or record-unsupported findings are grounds for reversal.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies the temporal anchor for Colorado’s SVP “stranger” criterion: courts must assess whether the parties knew each other at the moment of the offense, not when they first crossed paths. Defense attorneys and prosecutors alike should focus their SVP hearing evidence on the nature and extent of any pre-offense contact. Even a single day of text exchanges and in-person interaction may be sufficient to defeat a stranger finding, shifting the SVP inquiry to whether the offender cultivated the relationship for victimization purposes.
The competency ruling reinforces the broad discretion trial courts have when evaluating witnesses with cognitive or developmental disabilities. It signals that functional demonstrations of truthfulness — concrete question-and-answer exchanges — can satisfy Colorado’s competency standard even when a witness cannot articulate abstract definitions, a principle with significant implications for cases involving vulnerable adult victims.